


Waking Dreams

by Tobi_Black



Series: Til the End of the Line [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captain America: The First Avenger, Gen, M/M, Magical Realism, Strong Female Characters, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 05:58:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10984809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tobi_Black/pseuds/Tobi_Black
Summary: In the ice, Steve was awake. He dreamed of memories. He dreamed of the past.He was not the only one to remember.





	1. Chapter One: Memory is Nothing More than a Retelling of the Past

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [he's got a heart made out of stone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1593179) by [darth_stitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darth_stitch/pseuds/darth_stitch). 
  * Inspired by [Eight-Pager](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1741496) by [triedunture](https://archiveofourown.org/users/triedunture/pseuds/triedunture). 
  * Inspired by [After Glow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2764004) by [littlelostsputnik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlelostsputnik/pseuds/littlelostsputnik). 



> Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel.  
> Unbetaed. 5-23-17
> 
> If there are questions about terms, untranslated sentences, or concepts I'm applying as headcannon, please ask.
> 
> The Graphic Description of Violence and Major Character Death tags are a precaution, depending on how graphic the violence described is, and mostly regarding the ambiguousness of several main characters' death as presented.
> 
> Updated (5-29-17): I got a lovely piece of art made as cover art for Waking Dreams, by jazzy2may. It will be up as soon as I can make it the picture.  
> Here is the link, if I don't figure it out: http://jazzy2may.deviantart.com/art/CA-waking7-683431612?ga_submit_new=10%3A1496107912

_In the ice he was aware._

_It was only a vague sense of being_ cold _, of being_ wet _. Vaguely heard the cracking of ice, the deep creaking of frozen metal shifting in the smallest of water currents around him, in the feet thick ice that encapsulized the plane he was in_. _Vaguely still felt the torturously slow beat of his own heart, strong and steady still if with an eternity between beats._

_His mind was awake, drifting in dreams, in memories._

_He remembered not just the_ why _he had drove the plane into the ice – to save New York – but the_ intent _; he had wanted to die. Had hoped to die._

_He remembered how the cold had enveloped him like a mother welcoming her child home, her nails digging in and holding too tight and covering him bodily beneath her heavy weight. Remembered how it felt for the numbness that followed to spread from his toes to his head, leaving him with only a belief that he had existed in a body, mind drifting. Remembered how it felt for his heart to slow down until everything just faded away._

_He remembered the smile that had been on his lips at the thought of joining his best friend in death after a fall, not two weeks after the abrupt separation._

_It did not occur to him that he still lived; he relived memories and thought this is what happens in death._

_So eager to accept death, he thought that he had just not heard the_ bean sidhe _’s_ _scream in all the noise of crashing a plane into the ocean, that in his numbness, he did not feel the Morrigan’s talons. Did not realize they had been absent for some time._

Most of his life he’d been told that it was a miracle he still lived. That it was a miracle that having been born as early as he was, that he’d even lived more than a few hours after birth.

After another doctor had told his mother that it would be kinder to just let him die while he sat there on her hip, she had whispered into his ear as she curled up around him on their bed, that they had told her to not even name him, that it was bad luck to name a babe before the first week was up so that if their soul wasn’t ready, they could have another shot at it. That once she’d thumped him on his back when he’d been blue-faced at birth, he had _screamed_ louder than any other babe she’d ever had the pleasure of hearing when present for their birth. That he had angrily screamed like he was proclaiming to the world that he was alive, and fuck them, he _would_ live.

She told him of how she had promised him that if he wanted to live, then that she would do her best to keep him alive; told him of how she’d taken him to the freak-show that had come to town with their babies in eggs, in incubators that would keep him alive until he could survive without assistance, no matter how many times she was told that he should be dead already.

He had never understood the whispers of surprise about how a watch-girl like her had managed to have a child when none of the others hadn’t been able to carry a child nearly as long as she had. Nor would he for a very long time.

She had whispered in his ear, when he’d been small, barely to her knees and thin as a post, and having come back beaten up after he’d tried to help an older girl escape her bullies, as she’d tended his wounds, that he was like a fire. That he burned brightly and hot, and wouldn’t be doused by anything, wouldn’t be dimmed by anyone, and if his life was short, he had burned brighter than anything. Tears had been in her eyes as she’d hugged him tight to her chest, holding him close, telling him that he burned brighter than any star, brighter than the sun. That he was her sun; “ _Mo ghrain,_ ”.

Sick as he often was, and unable to stand down when he thought there was injustice, friends didn’t come easily to him. Who wanted to be friends with a kid who bruised like a peach, who wheezed like an old man after a brisk walk. A friend who wasn’t put off by the trouble he seemed to attract.

He was six, when he’d been walking down the streets a few blocks from his home, and spotted this bigger boy, thrice his size and twice his age, picking on a younger boy. He hadn’t hesitated to throw himself into the scene, yelling at the bigger boy to leave the younger alone, and trying to shove the bigger boy away as he stood between them, panting and heart beating too fast.

He'd already come to accept that he was never going to win any of these fights, but he took that whoever he rushed in to save managed to get away as a victory. That the other boy managed to run away with a dubious look his way, as if he’d felt bad for leaving him there but that his own safety outweighed his guilt, made this a victory.

His mother had told him stories of her homeland, of the Old Country where the Old Religion was still practiced right alongside the Catholic faith they’d adopted. She had told him of the Morrigan, the Goddess of Death, often traveling as a raven. She’d told him that a person could know their death was coming by seeing a raven with blood red eyes thrice in a moon.

He never did tell her that in almost all of his memories, a raven watched him. A raven with blood red eyes.

Even if he didn’t always see the raven, he knew that the bird was there. Watching. It was when it flew directly in front of him, that he had known that day that like the fire his mother had compared to him, he would burn brightly for only a short time, and today was when it would end.

He wasn’t afraid of death. It had been his constant companion, been his friend from the moment he had taken his first breath. Each breathe, each heartbeat, was a gamble, was him walking a fine line between living and dying. Every day had been a victory; every hour, every minute. Death hung over him like a specter, never went far, because death was always waiting.

He would put up a fight because running was never an option; if you ran, you would only die tired.

He’d been determined to go down swinging to the last.

He’d set his jaw, held up his fists and taken the punch he saw coming.

Knocked down but not out, he’d gotten up, already feeling a truly magnificent shiner start to bloom by his left eye. The next hit had given him a fat lip and a bloody nose, but he’d just grinned a bloody smile and held up his fists, refusing to stay down, “Come on, that all ya got? I could do this all day,”.

Then he’d heard footsteps running their way, and he’d stuck his chin up, not afraid that it was the bully’s reinforcements.

Then he’d seen an avenging angel. A boy only a year older but nearly twice as big as him. His dark hair disheveled, dark eyes bright with anger, “What the hell, you fucker?!”.

Didn’t even know him, and the boy was righteously angry for _him_ , and he found that for however he lived, this boy would always be the most important thing to him. Cemented that first moment that when he needed him, he was there.

His mother had whispered of soulmates to him with sorrow, at how they were like best friends but more, and that his father had been hers. That his father had found his in a scruffy black boy over in Harlem, and that for all he’d been raring to go to make the world a better place in the Great War, that he’d gotten himself enlisted alongside that boy to stand with him, and a part of him had died when Samson Wilson had died far from home, alone.

He knew instinctively that he’d found his. Just like he knew that his life had been saved that day, when with a startling loud _caw_ , the Morrigan left.

When the bully he’d forgotten for a moment was still there, didn’t run off at the other boy’s angry words, the boy had charged forward and thrown a punch that had knocked the bully down alongside him, nose broken and blood gushing down his front from it.

His pride had reared up then, and for all that he would always be thankful that he’d been rescued, he didn’t want the other boy to think he was weak, “I had that,”, chin jutting up and eyes defiant, “I had him on the ropes,”.

The other boy had turned on his heel and stared at him, just stared for a moment, then grasped and shook his shoulders, “Are you fucking crazy?! You damn punk! He was a mountain compared to you!”.

He grinned at the question, wide and bloody, “Maybe,”, for some reason pleased at the exasperation and dismay that played across the other boy’s face for a moment, “Can’t let bullies like that get away with doing that shit though.”. The tendrils of respect coming to the other boy’s eyes at those words, at how for all he looked like he could be blown away by the smallest wind, his spine was steel, pleased him more, to see a boy that would grow into a man any dame would love to say was her man, a man any other man would love to say was them, respect _him_.

He held out a bony hand, “I’m Steve Rodgers,”.

The other boy had grinned back at him, “Well, Steve, I’m James Barnes. Friends call me Bucky,”, shaking his hand firmly, as if he wasn’t a china doll masquerading as a boy.

That day as the boy, Bucky, had walked them back down the street with his arm flung around his thin bony shoulders, Steve had known his life would never be the same.

He had fought death at first for his mother, so she wouldn’t be alone, then also because he was an ornery bastard who didn’t know how to run away or give up. Now he would fight death away if it meant he would get to see another one of his smiles, hear his name said like it meant something, feel that comforting hand on his shoulder _just one more time_ – just be _near_ Bucky for a little while longer.

Only six years old and Bucky had become the center of his universe.

Two minutes, seven hours, twenty years, a century. No time would ever be enough. Just for this lifetime would never be enough. He would find him in the next life, and every one after that; he would always stand by Bucky.  No matter what happened, or what changed, no matter who they became.

When his mother had gotten home, and seen how his eyes glittered with joy, true joy, not a mimicry of being content for not having known there was better out there, she’d smiled and had understood then without words; For him, there would only ever be Steve-and-Bucky, Bucky-and-Steve, from here on out.

He never heard his mother that night with tears in her eyes and voice choked up, thank whatever deity, whatever god or God, that had given her son his first friend. That had put Bucky in his path, who had made their paths cross. Thanked them for saving his life, for finding someone to coax and feed and protect the fire that was her _ghrain_. Even when she was gone.

He never found the handkerchief dotted with specks of blood from where she’d fallen into a coughing fit earlier that very week.

~

_Frozen as he was, he dreamed._

_Whenever he was awake, the dreams hovered on the edge of his sight, nagging at him to not forget. Even when they started to settle him into that fucking chair, and put that damn contraption over his head, and fried his mind to_ make _him forget, the dreams lingered._

 _They were always fragments; the scent of cotton candy, holding somebody close and sheltering a skinny frame, whispered pleading for_ just one more night _, stomach clenching with hunger, the warmth of another body close to him, eyes so blue they put the sky to shame with just a hint of green in their depths._

_Every time he dreamed, the fragments shifted closer together just a little more._

_The dreams were never whole, too many pieces were blanks or blurs, but they remained no matter what was done to him when he was awake._

_He didn’t remember the cube that had glowed an unearthly blue, that instead of granting him knowledge and understanding like every other being that came in contact with it, had heard his pleas of_ don’t let me forget, please don’t let me forget him, them _as pain had broken him in Azzano._

 _No matter how they remained, he_ needed _them to remain. Needed to cling to something even as they tore out anything that had made him human. Even as he lost everything from when he was something other than The Asset, forgot he was human, forgot his name, forgot that he’d had a mother, he clung to the fragments. Even as the body was controlled by the Asset, and he could only watch all that was done to him, all that he did, before forgetting all that, he clung to the fragments, because he knew on some level that they weren’t_ really _dreams – they were memories of Before._

_In all those fragmented, broken memories that haunted him in the undefined time he remained alive, only one person ever truly separated from the blurriness to be seen, to be remembered even slightly, that held a name that he clung to with all the desperation of a man who had nothing else, of an animal backed into a corner hungry and wounded, of a monster that saw something good it did not have and felt drawn to protect it for the sake of finding out if they could be even a fraction of that good._

_Something about a blonde with a deep voice and eyes like the ocean stirred programming older than memory. The Asset recognized this programming, and sought to follow it._

_Every time he woke, the Asset looked for the blonde in those fragments. Looked for the blonde it was convinced was it’s one_ true _handler._

~

It was in late 1924 that he had met Bucky, the air still warm but a chill had started to sink in.

Winter came early that year.

Being adventurous children, they had wandered through most of Brooklyn as they played. Being children, few had thought about how they could overhear some shopkeepers talking about how it would be a lean winter, with crops failing in the mid-west. His mother had listened to the things they’d told her they’d overheard with a little frown, not understanding fully and wanting to know, chewing on her lip as the frown deepened with each word.

It would be years before he realized that he’d heard the first whispers of the Depression.

Then, he had just known that the ache in his stomach, a hunger that was never satisfied, was there to stay. His few complaints about the food they ate, little better than what the grocer would discard, quit as he watched a worried frown settle on his mother’s face at the amount they had, meager at the best of times with only her work as a nurse funding them and his copious medical bills and various medicines draining their funds, dwindled.

Then their heat went out after the first frost of the season in mid-October and they didn’t have the money to get it back.

His mother had forbid him from going anywhere out of bed in anything but layer upon layer of clothes, as the slightest chill got him sick.

Ever since he’d met Bucky, they had gone rarely a day where they didn’t meet up. Most mornings the older boy would come and escort him to school, stopping to pick up the oldest of his little sisters and the only one old enough for school on the way.

When he’d caught a cold that had refused to leave, sniffling and shivering in his mother’s bed wrapped up in blanket after blanket, Bucky had skipped school for that first week after dropping Becca off. Neither of their mothers, who upon introduction had gotten on just as well as their sons, had had the heart to reprimand Bucky when they had whispered to each other of how his mother, Sarah, didn’t think he would survive the winter.

The second week, when Steve neither got better nor worse, Bucky’s mother Winifred, had put her foot down. Steve hadn’t wanted Bucky to not be there, but he’d been stubborn, and had been trying to get the seven-year-old to go back to school so he could make something of his life, smart boy that he was. Bucky had not wanted to leave, but they were both momma boys, and couldn’t deny his mother, not when her face had started to get the same pinched quality Sarah’s had adopted months earlier.

Steve never told anyone how mere days after Bucky went back to school, that the Morrigan, whom he’d only seen at a distance for months, held at bay, returned. She settled herself in a roost near the roof of their building, and he could hear her _caw_ throughout the day and night.

His mother only turned pale at the sound as she curled up around him, coughing and shaking in the night.

He never found out that winter, she’d feared that the Morrigan would come for her, and ensure that he would follow her into death.

In the midst of the next cold snap, when snow had begun to follow and he still had not recovered, when his mother had bundled skinny little him that looked all of five instead of closer to seven, in as many of his clothes as she could get on him before putting a pair of her thicker dresses on him, (rightfully) worried that he would freeze to death while she went to work, the Morrigan had come down from her roost and had sat on the window sill outside their room.

It was only vaguely that as the temperature continued to drop and no matter how many blankets were wrapped around him, that he only felt cold, that he remembered barely hearing the frantic pounding on the door of his home. Only vaguely remembered stumbling out of his cocoon to the door to see a blue-tinged Bucky with snow in his dark hair and soaking into his clothes.

The older boy had spent most of the last week at the bedside of his younger sisters, fretting and worrying over how Ana had caught a cold and his father, who drank most evenings, had not been seen for most of the last couple of days. His mother had taken pity on him as she fussed over her husband who had come back fully sober for the first time in years, and had taken his place at his sister’s side, and scrounged up what she needed for a stew that her mother swore could heal all ills.

He'd brought a bowl of the stew and a giant knitted blanket with him, and seeing Steve sniffling and wavering in a dress had pushed his way past him, closing the door behind him before the little heat inside could escape.

He remembered that Bucky had picked him up like he weighed nothing, and had carefully, gently, tucked his sneezing, wheezing, shivering frame back into his mother’s bed. He remembered Bucky shedding his damp clothes and pulling on a dress of his mother’s before gently chiding him for how his attention lapsed and he had jumped at suddenly having him next to him, having retrieved the stew and holding out a spoonful to him. He remembered being fed as Bucky whispered more to himself than him in a language he didn’t know, “ _Vino pe Steve, acolo vom merge, mananca si te vei simti mai bine. Mama jură pe acest tocană, spune ca e cum mama ei a salvat viaţa tatălui ei_.”.

After he’d eaten until he was full, Bucky had practically licked the bowl clean to settle the gnawing at his own belly, then crawled under the big knitted monstrosity that had been settled over the entirety of the bed, cuddling up behind him. Bucky’s heat had settled into his aching joints and soothed the fever that had started to come after his mother had left, and blurry eyed, he watched as the Morrigan gave a loud _caw_ then flew off.

Bucky had wrapped himself around his smaller frame, left arm under him and palm laid over his chest, feeling his heartbeat, other arm curled over him and pulling him back, clutching at the sleeve of Steve’s dress like by sheer force of will he could keep Steve there among the living.

He never saw the gold that had flashed in Bucky’s eyes as he glared murder out the window at the raven watching them, promising a fight if she dared to take him.

He was asleep when his mother had come in half-panicked, almost believing that the cold had finally ended his life, and had frozen at the sight of tufts of blonde and brown hair sticking out of a giant knitted blanket she’d never seen on her bed. Had pulled back the top of the blanket to see her son sleeping easier than she’d ever seen, a warm flush of life on his cheeks despite how his breathe misted the air, instead of the cold blue-tinged soulless body of her boy.

She never told anyone of how in that moment as she watched the two children cuddle for warmth, that she was reminded of a dragon guarding its treasure with a fierce devotion. Never told anyone that as the years went on, the feeling never faded and instead grew.

As she slowly died, the feeling of Steve being Bucky’s treasure gave her comfort, assured her that _somebody_ would be there for her son. Would be there to assure that her _ghrain_ would live even without her there to shelter him.

As the weather had warmed to balmy and still cold, but less so, Steve’s cold had finally passed.

Bucky came over every day again, after school until he came back to class. Steve hated the cold, but that they could stay inside and Bucky would regale him with these stories his grandfather had told him, about the Old Country, about Romania, about the true Vlad Dracul, not the Dracula that Irish hack Bram Stoker had made, while he drew the animated Bucky, made it bearable.

By the end of the winter, he could recite with Bucky many of the elder Barnes’ stories as the older man regaled the Barnes children, and had filled his entire sketchbook full of drawings of him. With money so tight, he’d taken to using whatever scraps of paper he could get on to fulfill that itch to draw Bucky.

He drew other things, lots of things, and Bucky always saw those, but his true muse, his favorite thing to draw, was always Bucky. As much as he drew him, nothing ever seemed quite right, never seemed to _quite_ capture the essence of Bucky.

He hid those drawings of Bucky under a loose floorboard in his mother’s room.

It wasn’t that he was _ashamed_ of them; he would show Bucky when he had finally drawn the photo of Bucky that he felt was _worthy_ of being seen. Bucky _deserved_ to see exactly how Steve saw him.

The next spring, Becca had pouted in annoyance that the other girls on her street wouldn’t play with her, at how she was a tomboy and had loudly proclaimed that she wanted to be just like her big brother, and as she usually shadowed Bucky, following him around not unlike Steve did too, she’d pouted at her big brother. Hoping that by pouting at him, he could find a way to find someone to play house with her.

Bucky had gone quiet at her pout, trying to think of something to appease the girl. He hated how there were glimmers of angry tears in her eyes at the fucktards who’d refused to play with her for not taking their shit, particularly as this was the girl who had, when a boy had called her ugly, punched his teeth out.

When he’d been thinking too long for her liking, Becca had turned her pout on Steve, knowing that if she made him blush and stutter, that her brother would come charging in like Vlad Dracul had in her grandfather’s stories about the woman who had captured the man’s heart.

Thinking that, a sparkle had come to her eyes and she’d turned a shit-eating grin on Steve, and had dragged him to the room she’d shared with her sisters and Bucky. She’d pestered him into wearing one of her dresses, one that for all that he was a year older than her was a bit too big for him.

He remembered not resisting very much, too used to being bundled up in his mother’s clothes when it got too cold. That without any friends or siblings, he had spent more than one day by himself puttering around his little home like he’d seen his mother do. Had more than once pulled on one of her dresses and tied his floppy hair back into pigtails like he’d seen her do when it was warm and she was happy, tried to imitate how she moved as he tried to clean, mimicking the one role model he’d had.

He remembered Bucky rushing after them, staring as he’d slipped the dress on, putting up only a little resistance about how boys didn’t play dress up (like that). That he’d stared without blinking took away the ugly feeling that had sprung up hearing that from him.

Then Bucky had grinned as Becca explained to them that if the other girls wouldn’t play house with her, _they_ could, and whatever unease those words had brought up, too often being the target of bullies to give them another reason to tease, had disappeared.

He remembered them playing house a lot that spring and summer, dressing up in Becca’s clothes so he could play at being the mother, or the sister. Bucky always played at being the father, or the suitor of the sister, while Becca was content to play their daughter, or the sister, sometimes of the suitor and sometimes of the girl being courted.

He remembered how red he’d blushed at how Bucky called him ‘babydoll’ during these games.

He remembered how even after they stopped playing those games, or at least as often after Becca befriended a newcomer on the block, that Bucky didn’t mind playing the game, every once in a while, with just them. He remembered how, sometimes after, even when not dressed up, Bucky called him ‘babydoll’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘darling’.

He remembered Bucky teaching him how to braid Ana’s hair so that he could do hers as he did Becca’s when they started going back to classes.

He remembered how when he scraped up his knee after he’d gotten in another fight at the sandbox, that Bucky had pushed and pulled him along to somewhere he could clean up the small wound. He remembered how the other boy’s face had screwed up, and he’d quickly pecked the wound with a light blush on his thin cheeks.

Steve had narrowed his eyes at him, wondering if he was treating him like a little kid whose wounds needed to be kissed better, but Bucky had looked back defiantly, treating him as nothing less than as his best friend, and had said that his scrapes always healed better when his mother kissed them.

He’d been _very_ set on the idea that kissing a wound better, healed it faster.

Steve’d had enough wounds by then to know better. He’d had his mother kiss his scrapes and bruises plenty of times, and while they’d made him feel loved even when the universe hated him, they’d not taken away his pain or made him hurt for less time.

Bucky couldn’t be convinced otherwise.

When they were older, if he hadn’t thought that saying something would get them beaten up, he would have brought this up every time Bucky called _him_ a stubborn bastard, who once he’d gotten an idea in his head, couldn’t be dissuaded.

No amount of time could get Bucky to stop kissing his wounds better; he only made sure that no one else could see them when he did.

Eventually he stopped trying. The rare times Bucky got hurt, he returned the favor.

If his face got warm when Bucky _beamed_ at him afterwards, a warm glow he would carry for days after at making Bucky feel better, only he would know.

He never found that Bucky figured out by the time they were ten that kissing a wound didn’t make it heal faster, that it was the nasty tea his mother made him drink, but he did so because he enjoyed seeing Steve blush.

He never found out that half the things that Bucky did were because he thought his favorite expression of Steve’s was when he blushed. That his second favorite was when Steve’s eyes glittered with mischief, his third favorite when Steve straightened with righteous fury over the smallest injustices, willing to charge in despite being a third of his opponent’s size, probably explained a _lot_ about Bucky.

Being the good big brother, and unwilling to go roughhouse with the other boys on his streets without Steve being able to, Bucky had chaperoned a lot of Becca’s playing with the new girl on the street. A girl whose family had just come on a boat from Italy to Ellis Island. Steve had of course, to _no one’s_ surprise, gone with him.

They had seen her father greet old friends and family alike with a hug and a kiss, seen her mother do the same.

Their neighborhood was a mix of primarily Irish and Italian, so such greetings were not new.

When after a year of playing with the girl, Becca had copied such behavior to extend to them, it was no more oddity for them to return the hug and kiss upon greeting. That Bucky started to greet him like that, with a kiss on the cheek never struck him as odd.

It didn’t mean that they were fools; it was always quick, and _always_ out of sight.

If either of them had been Italian, perhaps they might not have been so secretive, but neither of them were and even if they didn’t understand why it was thought bad, they knew two boys being abnormally close was _bad_ , so they were secretive.

For all his bluff and swats when Bucky skirted the line between best friends and _more_ doing things like this, he didn’t hate it, didn’t make it clear that he wanted it to _stop_. Often, he would return the gestures in small ways.

He was all too aware as he got older that despite him reading into his actions, that it didn’t mean Bucky was putting those intentions there.

~

_While he dreamed of fragmented memories, it still took years for one to pull together enough to perhaps be recognizable._

_It turned out to be of the day he’d met the boy who’d become everything to him._

_He couldn’t tell you what year it was then, if it was morning or evening, let alone what season it was, where they had been, or who had been involved. Not then, and maybe ever again._

_He remembered being out doing something with a bunch of boys whose faces he couldn’t remember, whose faces were lost to him, when the sound of flesh hitting flesh reached his ears. He remembered running towards it, inexplicably drawn, to see a taller blur of a boy punching this skinny little_ punk _, who said, “Come on, I can do this all day,”, even with a truly magnificent shiner, a bloody nose, and a determined set to his jaw._

_He remembered that he yelled at the older boy, though he couldn’t remember what, before he threw a punch when he didn’t back off. He remembered that he’d not been too big himself, but that he’d been nearly double the size and weight of the blonde he’d come to the rescue of. He remembered that he had broken the other boy’s nose, remembered the blonde struggling to stand, eyes defiant, saying, “I had that, I had him on the ropes.”._

_He remembers that he turned around and shook the smaller boy by his thin shoulders, questioning the other boy’s self-preservation instincts, “Are you fucking crazy?!”. He remembers the other boy’s bloody grin, “Maybe. Can’t let bullies like that get away with doing that shit though.”, before he held out a hand, “I’m Steve.”._

_The Сол_ д _а_ т _was silent throughout this memory,_ “Это был обработчик. Это было, когда Миссия стала: защищать Стив.” _, a hard tone to his voice,_ “Эта миссия прежде всего для всех остальных.”.


	2. Chapter Two: Nothing Exists to be Less Black-and-White As Someone's History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hindsight is 20/20.

_There were moments in the ice, particularly in the beginning, when he was closer to the surface, when the water was cold but not frozen._

_He would wake briefly, trying to scream past the water in his lungs, his hands outstretching out for the man that consumed his mind._

_In his more morbid moments of awareness, after his body stopped fighting minutes after even the fittest swimmer, he could_ feel _the burst cells in his body heal. He cursed the serum then, cursed that again, it had taken suicide from him._

 _He would think_ what-good-is-a-body-that-does-not-die-when-the-heart-is-dead _as the ice froze him solid again, again and again each spring and summer._

_He pointedly did not think of how one day, the ice would release him from her cruel embrace, force him to live again. Did not think that time would pass him by and everyone he’d known would be dead, and he would be truly alone. His heart was already broken in two; it would be shattered into millions of pieces to find that all those that he’d loved were dead._

_He would rather face an eternity of thawing and freezing than to face that._

_A part of him was already grieving, mourning, raging as he sobbed inside at the injustice of it all._

Despite Bucky’s best efforts, Steve remained balanced on the knife edge between living and dying.

The food situation had gotten worse, people not bothering to hide their unease and worries as more and more crops failed as the next couple of years passed.

Between the two mothers passing recipes back-and-forth that stretched what they had the farthest, while they all got thinner, no one starved like some families did.

Steve, always thin with his bones prominent, was like a rail by 1926.

Sarah wasn’t much better, but she’d begun to lose her appetite, and they’d noticed that she had a cough, one that would not go away.

Both Rodgers ate like birds, through Steve was hungry, he just couldn’t stomach half of what he ate as he sniffled, sneezed, wheezed, coughed, and shivered through cold after cold. Both fading away.

It didn’t mean that Bucky didn’t bring over food every evening, and tempted a shy appetite into making an appearance, sharing a bowl of whatever soup or stew his mother had made.

When the carrot didn’t work, he threatened the stick: if Steve wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t eat either.

Steve never noticed that even as he ate, Bucky always matched his pace, was a heartbeat behind, always feigned to be full, said he had eaten before he’d come over, despite bringing his own dinner, just be sure that Steve made it through. Both Sarah and Winifred knew what he was doing, but said nothing because they knew if Bucky survived and Steve didn’t, that the boy was not long for this world.

Bucky’s grandfather had taken Winifred aside one day, far more somber than usual, and told her that if she tried to save her boy’s life by making him stop, she would still lose him. Bucky would never forgive her, not completely, for forcing him to live and to watch Steve die when he thought he could do something to prevent it. Told her that those two had a bond that even Death respected, and that where one went, the other was destined to follow. His eyes, a dark brown that seemed tinted red in certain lights like dried blood, had seemed to glow then, promising her that as long as Steve lived, her son would be happy.

It had gone unspoken but acknowledged that the older man would see to it that they had that chance to be happy. In a thousand years from then or in the next lifetime.

When Steve caught scarlet fever, and the Morrigan returned to her perch on his window sill, with a heavy heart, Sarah called for the priest. Winnifred prepared herself to do the same if Steve passed, for Bucky.

Bucky never told anyone that even after the priest had left, that as he’d remained glued to Steve’s side, holding him tight to his chest as if to anchor him to the living, that they’d been visited by a grotesque woman. Her death-pale skin had sagged and clung too tight over her bones, one eye the milky white of the dead while the other remained a too-vibrant unearthly blue, dressed in dirty soot-stained garments that reminded him of a shroud. She had appeared suddenly, seemed to spring from the heavy shadows in the room, and as she did, the red-eyed crow that had been haunting Steve flew through their closed window.

He had turned to look at Sarah, to see if she was seeing what he was, but she remained asleep, dead to the world, and the woman spoke, a puzzled tone to her dry deep voice, which sounded like the bells that rang after funerals, low and haunting, “Why do you remain aware?”.

He had curled tighter around Steve, knowing instinctively that this was Death, before his eyes had flashed gold in the gloom, “No, you can’t have him!”. He had seen a flash of recognition, of understanding, in her eyes, “Ah, so this is the dragon soul that has held the Morrigan at bay. I wondered why this soul remained here instead of being brought to Valhalla.”.

 _He_ was puzzled when a faint pout came to her cracked lips, “Father wanted to see if this soul could wield Mjölnir,”, before she more closely looked at Steve, “Despite how the three sisters pluck at his thread with each sickness, his soul remains strong. It is perplexing. No mortal soul would survive so long in so weak a body.”.

Something about the way she looked at Steve made him hiss, back arching over where he’d come to crouch over the smaller boy, eyes a solid gold, and she’d thrown him an indulgent look for it before leaving as Steve’s breathes strengthened, “Your boy there, for all that his soul is strong, his body is weak. He may not have died today, but he will soon.”.

Bucky never told that he was sure that he’d met Death then, that he’d kept Steve alive for one more night, but he took her words as ringing prophecy, determined to prove her false.

Steve ultimately recovered mostly whole from scarlet fever, barring the loss of most of his hearing in his left ear.

Bucky took to walking on his left and leaning over him from behind to speak directly into his right ear. Few people came to know he was functioning deaf in his left ear, but between the Barnes family and his mother, he found that it mattered little, wasn’t held back by it.

He remembers a few months later, his birthday having come and gone without half of his hearing, that his mother in her weekly confession must have said something to the priest about the loss, as when he came in to confess after her – mostly about how he was still getting into fights trying to stop bullies, nothing about what that which he would find Abnormal – he was given this little booklet.

It was a beginner’s book to American Sign Language for the deaf.

At first he was offended, but it quickly faded when Bucky found the booklet and his eyes damn near _sparkled_.

Bucky who enjoyed learning as much as he did, though he hated the institution as it penalized him for being left-handed, for slipping into Russian when he didn’t know the English word, thought learning another language was the coolest thing ever.

Bucky, with the Barnes side of the family being half Roma and half Romanian, and the Eckerstein side of the family being Russian Orthodox Jews, knew five tongues. Steve, with his mother being Irish, had known two languages when he’d met Bucky, and had come to learn two more from being a frequent visitor at the Barnes’. That they could learn another, one that would be nearly all theirs with them knowing no other deaf people, had Bucky more diligently learning the language than doing his homework.

His mother picked up some of the language, as did Becca. Little Evie Barnes, with her legs weakened by polio since she was a babe, took to the learning of another language like a bird to flight.

With so much of the neighborhood Irish, Bucky had picked up a splattering of Gaelic even before becoming friends with Steve, and with so much of the neighborhood Italian, they had both picked up a splattering of Italian, particularly with being over with Becca at her friend’s house.

Between the two of them, their conversations jumped around in four different languages, pieces of another two, and some sign.

It was how they got their first jobs running messages through the neighborhood between those who could barely speak to one another.

When it was clearly spring again, in 1927, the Barnes children were invited to an older cousin’s bar mitzvah, and with Steve spending so much of his time there, he was essentially another Barnes to most of the neighborhood, he was invited by proxy.

While they were there, their Russian being put to good use and Steve learning a handful of Yiddish, Bucky won a candy ring. Instead of giving it to Becca like he’d been expecting, he had given it to him.

They’d both blushed, but the moment was cut short when Ana called for Bucky, wanting his help to win herself a prize.

The moment Bucky had been out of hearing, Ariel Eckerstein, Bucky’s maternal grandmother, had pulled him aside and sought a promise out of him. A promise that one day, he would make an honest man out of her grandson. He had turned so red he’d felt a bit light-headed, and his eyes had immediately sought out Bucky, almost comically wide, knowing that if anyone else had heard her, that they would just think her senile, but he’d be labelled Abnormal, as perverting the natural order, for giving her reason to think that, for not immediately denying it with disgust. Then she had continued, whispering into his ear, that when he did, that she would make him the most beautiful bride there ever was for Bucky in return.

When Bucky had been quick to retrieve him from his grandmother, shuffling him close to his right side, making signs into his left hand asking if he was okay, having seen Steve turn a bright red, he’d said nothing about their exchange of promises.

Never said anything about it. Almost forgot about it until the winter of ’29, when she died at sixty-nine.

After she died, George Barnes had refused to hear any talk about anything Jewish in the house as whispers went through the neighborhood that the Jews had drawn God’s wrath and had brought this famine upon them, refused to let Bucky have his bar mitzvah in the coming August and have him associated as a Jew.

He remembered that the man occasionally muttered that it was right that the old woman’s will was being contested, leaving stipulations that couldn’t be fulfilled.

He didn’t realize that the stipulation the man had been talking about had involved him until the rabbi Ariel had been close to had visited in the month after her death, when he’d had pneumonia and his mother had called for last rites _again_ , to tell him in a whisper that he needed to fight this, that Ariel would have wanted him to keep his promise to her because she would keep hers.

Considering that in the years that followed, George had still grumbled about the crafty old woman and how she’d left part of her will in trust for when ‘Bucky married that friend he’d been sweet on since they’d met’, he was inclined to believe that Ariel would keep her promise.

He did not find out for a long time after the War, that the rabbi, old and on his last breathes, had entrusted the will and the things Ariel had left the two, to a married Becca. For the day that when the two were brought home, the promise could be fulfilled, even in death.

~

_In his dreams, fragments of other memories started to come back, awoken to start to trickle through the black after he began to remember Steve._

_There were mostly just moments of Steve; “Who made you king of the castle” – crooked smiles – bright eyes – bony hands too big for his small body – deep laughs – pulling bony shoulders close._

_There were other moments; a woman who shared his eyes that smiled at him and pulled his small hand to her rounded stomach and he felt a kick – holding three smaller bodies within his arms and a promise to protect them – a drunk man with a harder version of his face waving a gun at him – an older grey-haired man with his face pulling him close and calling him_ Iakov _– the taste of cigarette smoke – the feel of promenade on his hand after slicking his hair back – a blue suit._

_Frozen, he began to pull together his memory._

_Awake, he remembered little. He was the Сол_ д _а_ т; _his mission was whatever his handlers named._

_Awake or asleep, he looked for Steve. Waiting, watching._

~

When the market crashed, Steve remembered where he’d been when they found out. They all knew where they had been.

He had been dictating the transcript of the suffragist movement his mother was a part of. One of the women, running late, had been pale as she’d kept saying, “It’s all gone, it’s all gone,”, unable to accept her own statement.

Many of their neighborhood, having been convinced by the banks in the last couple of years that investing would double, triple their money, had rushed to withdraw their savings.

His mother had given a small smile, petting at his bangs as she showed him the floorboard (next to the one full of his drawings of Bucky) that she’d stuffed a cookie tin beneath, one that held all their meager savings. She’d told him how for generations, her family had been turned away from English banks for being Irish, and that they’d never put their money in a bank even when they could here in this new land.

Bucky had told him his mother had never trusted banks; her mother had told her of how when after the revolution, all money had been seized. All their money, not much but enough that they had been well-off enough to not be poor, had been taken by the government. Having fled Russia with pretty much all they could carry and barely enough money to pay for their passage over.

Because of such, they’d not fared as badly as others.

That winter after the Crash was terrible.

No one could say that they didn’t know someone who died, from the cold, from sickness, from starvation that winter.

Most people didn’t have jobs anymore. Many people lost their homes.

His mother got sick, couldn’t work for a week. They lost their home.

For several weeks, they were among the dozens that lived in the tent towns that sprung up all over the city as people lost their homes, unable to pay rent.

His mother had been a feminist, a suffragist, had been a unionist. She’d been an abortionist; somebody young women went to in secret, just like Winifred Barnes. His father had been for equal rights, against the immigration restrictions in place, was in favor of ‘white’ being expanded to include more of the population. He’d grown up hearing all these ideas – upon learning this, Bucky had realized that whatever righteous streak he’d had, had been fostered in this environment and there was no stopping him from standing up to injustice now over ten years too late – but it was here that he’d been introduced to socialist ideas.

They’d not spent too long there, before they’d been invited into the Barnes home.

They’d been thankful, but proud. As soon as his mother had the money, she’d found them an apartment, even smaller than the one they’d had before, and in a worse part of their neighborhood, but it was their own. Winifred had made it clear that if they ever needed it again, they could stay with them again.

Bucky had begged with him as he caught his annual winter cold that he swallow his pride and stay with them instead of the streets if they had to.

Having seen the fear in Bucky’s eyes, he’d agreed without much fight. He was proud, but he wanted to live. He would swallow his pride if need be.

He said nothing at how Winifred sent Bucky with food every day. Said nothing at how Bucky brought over the clothes too small for him and left them there. Said nothing at the pity that their neighbors gave them.

It didn’t mean he did nothing.

He was thirteen when his mother told him she was sick. She told him he was dying.

He got desperate for money.

For years he’d earned pennies for running messages back and forth through the neighborhood. He had heard that by the Navy docks, a fella could earn coin by turning tricks. There was a club in the area ran by the mafia, where men who liked other men could find male prostitutes, and if you waited in the alleyway during certain hours, you could earn a few coins.

It would be more coin then he could earn doing other jobs, as frail and sick-prone as he was.

As much as no one would talk about it, more than a few boys in their neighborhood had turned a few tricks as money got tight. If you saw somebody down there, you never said anything about it. It was acknowledged that you were doing what you had to, and you kept quiet about it.

Didn’t mean that there weren’t rumors floating about who frequented that area most.

He never told Bucky but in the two years prior to then, almost half the fights he had gotten into were about how Bucky had pretty lips made to suck cock, and he’d been defending his honor.

Bucky never told him that some of the rumors were true. Some of the coin he slipped Sarah to pay for Steve’s medicine had come around from turning tricks.

Bucky never told him about the rumors about his slight frame and that he’d make a pretty dame to fuck, or how many faces he’d had to bloody to shut them up.

Steve headed down there one evening, having resolved himself to turning a few tricks so he could pay for some medicine for his mother.

Just as he was about to head home, cold and sniffling without any luck, he’d been approached by somebody he knew was in the mafia. He’d been asked to carry a few packages from there to other places, offered coin he couldn’t refuse.

He ran packages once a week, for four months, and earned more coin than most of the building put together in the same time.

Doing so told him where some underground speakeasies were. He refused to feel guilty when he pickpocketed people there, not when they acted like George Barnes when he’d had too much to drink.

It led him to finding out about Ms. Clare’s.

Ms. Clare’s was where you came when you wanted a lady with a bed, wanted a show.

The girls there were nice to him, thought him cute for treating them like dames, like he could bring them home to his mother. Ms. Clare saw him sketching on a napkin one of the girls’ acts, and hired him to draw her fliers.

Ms. Clare paid him less for six days’ work than his one night a week of acting courier, but he preferred that job.

He remembered thanking God for his job with Ms. Clare when during one of his runs, the man he usually met with was sick that week and somebody new met him, somebody who tried to take liberties with him. He thanked God that Bucky had gotten suspicious about how he’d been the one paying for the apartment he shared with his ma, paid for her medicine, and that he’d followed him that night. Thanked God that when the man had tried to force himself on him, Bucky had come to his rescue.

The man who approached him the first time found him the next day and told him his services were no longer needed as the man who’d accosted him had been found dead in an alley, and they didn’t want him squealing to the police if they stumbled across him.

Ms. Clare had heard about the murder, and had taken him aside and said that his job was safe. That she didn’t blame him for killing that man, not when more than one of her girls had been accosted by him on their way home.

He never told anyone that he’d simply stood there as Bucky had beaten him to death.

Bucky never told him that the mafia had approached him afterword and tried to get him to be one of them, and that he’d been tempted, hadn’t hesitated because he’d had a problem with breaking kneecaps or busting in skulls, had hesitated only because he’d been afraid of what Steve would have thought of him.

Neither of them ever spoke of that night.

Steve never went out alone after dark again, and when he went to Ms. Clare’s, Bucky took him there. Mixed drinks at the bar as he waited for Steve to be done, then took them home.

Steve never told him how Ms. Clare had winked at him, and said that he had a keeper there, and he better not ever let go of him.

Even knowing his mother was dying, it had come as a shock the day he heard the _bean sidhe_ that winter.

He stayed at her bedside that entire day after calling for the priest, tears ceaselessly running down his cheeks as they traded sweet memories and whispered declarations of love.

She’d had him pull out one of the few possessions they hadn’t pawned no matter how slim money had become, and told him that it was his father’s. Told him that she’d painted it herself in the factory while he’d been off at war, gifted it to him on his return, and had been intending to give it to him when he’d be older after Joseph had died. She gave it to him then, helped him fasten it on his wrist after winding it up.

He’d sobbed into her shoulder at the story.

Everyone had known that she had been the one to teach him to live, had taught him to stand up and never run away. No one was surprised that after she’d gotten sick, she’d clung on for years longer than most, as Steve had to have gotten his stubbornness from someone.

Steve never told anyone that as she died slowly, painfully, face tight but eyes peaceful, a smile on her lips, that she’d taught him how to die. She’d taught him to fight and claw to live, but she’d also taught him that when the time came, how to die gracefully.

He remembered as he watched her call Bucky forward for a few private words, hoping that when he died in the near future – knowing that the chances of him living to his thirties was practically non-existent and that his days were numbered to be perhaps a decade – that he died as gracefully as she did.

Bucky never told him that Sarah Rodgers had made him promise her that he always be there for Steve, that she didn’t care how he was, just that he be there. Had told him that she’d considered him her other son, and that she loved him. Had told him that she had thanked the gods every day that he’d met Steve, and she could die easy knowing somebody would be looking out for him.

That as she’d slipped him her wedding ring, a small mischievous smile on her lips, her last words were that she hoped that one day her ring ended up on Steve’s finger from him.

Sarah had never told anyone of the bet she’d made with Bucky’s grandfather that one day, they would be wed in the eyes of God. His grandfather never told anyone as he delivered flowers to her grave decades later as society changed to accept two men together, that he was sure that she was smirking down at him from above them, a twinkle in her eye with a ‘told you it could happen’ on her lips.

Steve just knew that she breathed her last moments after her talk with Bucky, a smile on her lips and love in her eyes.

~

 _The Сол_ д _а_ т _was the one to pull together one memory._

_A woman with a face like Steve’s lay dying. She called him forth and made him promise him that he always be there for her son._

_He thought she might have said that she loved him, and that she had given him a ring, her ring, for a reason, but those pieces weren’t there._

_The_ Солдат _was very focused on this memory,_ “Это было, когда Миссия была назначена. Параметры миссии слишком экспансивный. Первым приоритетом является защита, все остальное является вторичным.”.


	3. The Only Constant is Change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The only constant in life, is change. Inevitable, unavoidable. Life continues on.

_As the years passed in the ice, he felt the cold that surrounded him, enveloped him, come to consume him._

_The cold sank into his very bones._

_He doubted if he would ever be able to shed the chill that haunted him, would ever be warm again._

_He wasn’t sure he wanted it to leave; Didn’t feel like he deserved to ever feel the warmth of living again._

After his mother died, Steve had gone through life numb.

He didn’t remember much of the weeks after. He did remember that Bucky had not let him be alone.

He remembered that he’d used most of his savings to get his mother as nice a headstone as he could afford, a simple cross with her name and date of birth and death inscribed on it. He remembered the Barnes family being there for him, reminding him to eat and taking him into their house so he wouldn’t be alone.

He barely remembered her wake a week after, even as many in the neighborhood came to where O’Reilly’s speakeasy was for it, doing as many did for a death, and ignored the ban on alcohol in favor of honoring a loved one in the way the Irish had been doing for generations.

He remembered crying weeks after her death as the city set off fireworks for New Year’s, the numbness fading away to grief at this being his first birthday without her.

He remembered Bucky holding him as he sobbed.

That year was the only time Bucky didn’t try to convince him that the fireworks were for him, for his birthday. Every other year of their friendship, he stuck to that ridiculous line, and after that, he stopped protesting. He’d believed those first few years, because it made him feel special, and now he let it be, having seen that _Bucky_ needed to believe the lie.

He never told Bucky that he understood. That they saw so much death, knew death haunted their neighborhood like it lived there, that life needed to mean something.

Bucky never told him that he needed the fireworks to celebrate that Steve had survived another year, had beat all the odds and had come out alive. Had known that Steve was his heart, his moral compass, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d live without him, how long it would take for him to earn him a spot in Hell without him there.

As the months went on, he was able to get past his grief. It never faded completely, still sat like a heavy stone beneath his breast that took little prodding to burn anew, but it no longer numbed him to the world.

That fire to do right still burned, and he began to get into fights again.

Steve later thought that Bucky was, on some level, so pleased to see him have his spunk back, that it was probably the only reason why he only weakly protested when the girls at Ms. Clare’s celebrated the death of Prohibition in early December in 1933 by plying them with drink now that it was legal again. Three drinks in, it was clear that Steve was a lightweight despite the Irish being almost as well-known as the Russians for their drinking, and that he was a true man of Russia.

Steve didn’t really remember much about the night; there were flashes, but not a whole lot.

Even years later with nothing but time to devote to trying to remember, the memory was fuzzy.

He full-heartedly blamed how Bucky’s eyes had sparkled and he’d tossed back a shot of whisky like it was water, and that he’d seen the challenge Bucky had delivered. It had been _challenge accepted_ , and he’d tried to throw back his own shot and had to cough heartily to clear his lungs as it burned down his throat. Bucky had known that he wouldn’t back out gracefully even as the second shot made his head swim and his body all floaty.

He vaguely thought that he’d been a bit of a giggly drunk.

Certainly after Bucky had gestured to the girls to bring him what had amounted to hard cider from then on out.

He might have been a little handsy as he scooted closer to Bucky, clinging to him, draping himself over his lap. Honestly, he really hoped the fuzzy memory of him having suddenly sprung forward after a bit, with a laugh that made _him_ think of pixies about to make mischief, wasn’t real considering he’d started striping on the table like he’d seen the girls do a thousand times.

He had a feeling it was real though; he remembered Bucky’s eyes going wide, and perhaps a little darker, before he’d shouted, “OH MY GOD STEVE! NO!”, face contorting in some mix of his familiar _oh-my-god-steve-no_ face and something new, and had lunged for him. He eventually remembered that he’d twisted away and then had gone on to prance across the tabletops like a demented squirrel on caffeine, bouncing from place to place and making Bucky chase him, “ _Come on_ Buck, play with me!”.

He thought Bucky had eventually caught him, no thanks to the girls because they’d cracked up at the sight, before grumbling to himself and lighting a cigarette one of the girls had gotten him on.

He must have whined at the fact that Bucky could smoke and he couldn’t with his asthma, because he remembered getting a face full of smoke. After coughing a little, he thinks he’d giggled and smacked Bucky on the thighs from where he’d been pinned over his lap, “Again, again!”.

The last bit he was pretty sure happened because most times after, when Bucky smoked, he blew the smoke in his face with a smirk, as if saying _there, happy now you punk_.

Steve vaguely remembered Ms. Clare coming into the room and staring at the chaos that had made the room a disaster zone after Bucky had chased him around, before sighing. He thinks she might have pointed a finger at the girls and said something to the effect, “Have you looked at him? _You_ weigh more than him, of course he’s going to be a lightweight. I expect this to be cleaned up before the hour is up.”. Then that she’d waved Bucky off when he’d made a move to assist.

He didn’t remember how Bucky had scooped him up and threw him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, or that as they’d left he’d been singing an off-tune rendition of the strip polka, smacking at Bucky’s ass for a beat.

Bucky made sure to tell him in excruciating detail and volume the next morning about the pieces he didn’t remember though, returning the session of ass bongos with interest – while they were the only ones in the house, of course. Neither of them were so stupid as to do so while Winifred or the girls were in the house, even when hungover.

They did not speak of how they were pretty sure they heard Bucky’s grandfather snicker about this, and that he had hummed along with the song. Some things just did not need to be talked about.

After that though, Ms. Clare’s brought in a lot more money as they could advertise openly again, what with having a liquor license again. It was enough money for Steve to find a little apartment and move out of the Barnes’.

It was not enough for him pay rent past the second month, not after a cold cost him half a month’s rent thanks to the medicine.

He looked for another job, but most of the few jobs that there was, were heavy-lifting, with long hours in places his asthma hated. The others were jobs at the railroad, with the ships – ones he was expected to travel with.

The circus was in town for a couple of weeks, and while he did earn a bit of money sketching up fliers for them, the job didn’t last long before they were packing up and moving on to their next location.

Earning money wasn’t the only reason why he’d hung around the circus.

Skinny, asthmatic, he may have been, but he learned a few things from some of the performers.

Bucky had long ago taught him the proper way to make a fist if he was determined to fight, and boxing was in his Irish blood, but the strongman, the acrobats, they taught him how to use his size to his advantage in a way Bucky couldn’t with him being so much bigger than him. He learned a bit of knife work from some of the other performers; how to conceal a knife, how to properly hold it, how to flick a switchblade open, how to use it, how to block with it. He wasn’t a master with it, didn’t use it in his fights because as long as his opponent fought with his fists, so did he, but he carried it. He wasn’t so naïve as to believe that all of his fights would be with fists, would end with fists, and carried it so that when they crossed a line, he would not be caught empty-handed.

He never told Bucky about learning to fight with a knife at the circus.

He never asked where Bucky got his own switchblade, and learned to fight with it. Just as Bucky never told him that he’d stolen it off a mafia man who’d called Steve a fairy, and carried it for the day his father had too much to drink.

After the job with the circus, Bucky told his parents he was moving in with Steve without telling Steve first, during the Sunday dinner he shared with them.

No one protested, the dinner conversation continued without a protest before Steve could argue.

He remembered how Bucky’s eyes had flashed triumphantly at that, his smirk saying _it’s settled_.

And that was that. Bucky moved in with Steve into his cupboard-sized apartment not far from the Navy docks in a neighborhood that while being dirt cheap, was known for being a queer neighborhood.

They were harassed a couple of times those first few weeks, as Bucky started working at the docks and Steve continued at Ms. Clare’s, but the police stopped after a bit. Everyone in the neighborhood thought Steve was a shitty liar, didn’t lie at all, always coming clean about any candy he nicked, so when he said they were living there because “Sorry officer, but I’m poorer than poor, and sick a lot, I don’t have the money to live anywhere else”, they believed him.

Bucky had _loved_ to call bullshit on the pretty words that left his mouth.

Steve was half-convinced that it was Bucky’s favorite thing to do; being present for 95% of the things that left his mouth, and 80% of the things he did, Bucky would know if “no ma’am, we did not run past here in the middle of the night wearing my ma’s brassier” generally meant instead, “ma’am, we giggled as we skipped, completely drunk so perhaps staggered would be a better word, past here at three in the mornin’ wearing Mrs. Barnes’ brassier”. Steve was fairly sure that Bucky _preened_ at him being such a little shit, sometimes wiping a fake tear from his eye at the student having suppressed the master, since he wasn’t directly lying, which was a sin, but simply taking the piss by simply denying things in the wrong phrasing.

The day that a police officer had come to Ms. Clare’s and asked if he was a little young to be there, and he’d cheekily said no, saying it was legal for him to be there, Steve had been sure Bucky had nearly choked on his laughter, particularly as once the officer had left, his eyes had sparkled with mischief as he’d finished his earlier statement with, “Legal only perhaps considering my age _now_ ,”.

For all they were always scrambling for money, at how more often than not, they ate at or got food from Mrs. Barnes, Steve thought some of his happiest memories came from living with Bucky.

He was still drawing Bucky every spare moment he had, never showing him, hiding the drawings that had as the years gone on, gotten considerably less innocent.

Some of them now were perhaps a bit racy; when Bucky was sleep-rumbled with his clothes all askew, when he was sweaty and laughing, as he walked around their apartment nude in the hotter months.

One of the girls at Ms. Clare’s had heard him grumbling that working there combined with teenage hormones was taking innocent pictures and making pin-ups, and had burst out laughing, tears in her eyes.

She’d laughed at him for a solid week, making his default expression for a while a pout.

She’d laughed harder when Bucky had come in, all scowling and almost ready to start a fight to find out why he’d been unhappy, unable to speak past the breathy laughs. As they’d left, and after she’d apparently explained her laughter to one of the other girls, they’d been escorted out by feminine giggling, giggling that had lasted for a month afterword.

Being sixteen by this point in time, things should have gotten a bit awkward being two teenage boys in a small space.

Steve made a point not to question why it didn’t.

Bucky, being nearly a year older with his birthday in August, had started to have _those_ types of dreams when he’d been nearly fourteen. With their mothers both being abortionists and a bit more liberal thinking than most, they’d gotten _very_ thorough explanations about sex and how it wasn’t a sin to have desires, but if Winifred, or Sarah if she’d still been alive, had ever found out that they’d gotten a girl pregnant from not being safe and they didn’t claim responsibility, they wouldn’t have to worried about the girl’s father escorting them to church to get them married, or George, the women would do it for the men. After Winifred had to wash his sheets three days in a row, she’d made him start doing his own laundry, particularly considering that she’d made sure all four of her children, and Steve, could take care of a home, so he had no excuse on not knowing how.

He’d started going on dates with dames by the time he was sixteen, some for longer than others, and always coming back to tell Steve all about them.

Steve thought later, that perhaps he’d simply gotten into the habit of telling him everything that happened on a date, because he’d later would tell him about the kisses he gave dames. Tell him about how they’d necked behind the movie theaters, sometimes in some cars when the dames had access to cars.

Steve thought that Bucky rather liked the cars more than the dames, considering how often he would be side-tracked waxing poetic about the vehicle.

Bucky certainly didn’t censor himself, like Steve came to suspect later that he’d done in his mother’s house in fear of her overhearing, about how he went down on the dame and made her squeal.

Steve thought later that Bucky liked to talk, and talk and talk. He could listen and hear what was being said like a pro, but he liked to talk. Could charm anyone, but if the opportunity came to talk, he could talk like no one else.

He also liked to be very explicit. There were no details he kept out.

With them growing up in Brooklyn, cursing was their language. As Steve’s mother had taught him, cursing was nothing to be ashamed of, he just had to take in situation and audience – you didn’t curse talking to your parents, or priests, and not in polite company, except perhaps when they did so first, and never in church. So Bucky cursed the air blue as he talked about his nights out with dames.

Steve also later thought Bucky had very little shame, because once they were out of his mother’s home, beyond when he would go nude in the heat, when the urge struck, Bucky would stroke himself and cum. It made him blush to think of all the places he would turn to look at Bucky, and find him with a hand down his pants stroking himself. It wasn’t that Bucky couldn’t, Steve was just sure that Bucky didn’t care if anyone caught him as long as it wasn’t his mother or sisters.

He very vividly remembered the time that after Bucky had put a stop to another of his fights, he’d started stroking at himself, and this dame had come around the corner and seen. Bucky had just smirked, held his hat over the bulge in his pants, and said if she wanted a show, she was welcome to stay and watch.

He also remembered that those two facts about Bucky very much carried over to their apartment.

More than once it would be late, and Bucky would come home with a dame as he drew on the fire escape, and he would pretty much narrate the things he did with the dame. She never asked if he lived here alone, so Bucky never lied about him being home.

Steve however was a bit of a late bloomer, something his mother would have probably said was due to his whole host of medical problems, and while he did enjoy the dreams he’d had, sex wasn’t something that seemed to concern him as much as Bucky. Probably in part to the fact that actually doing anything was a one-in-three chance of causing him an asthma attack, or cause his heart to actually skip a beat.

The few times he did, Bucky had at first helped – said it was so he knew what to do, knew the best way to do this. Then he always watched – said that it wouldn’t do for him to keel over because he was ashamed to be seen. He also always talked, because he was Bucky, and Bucky couldn’t stop talking, particularly when it came to do anything with sex.

Steve barely acknowledged it himself, but more than once, it had been Bucky’s voice that had done it for him, Bucky saying all these _filthy_ things in this low voice. He barely acknowledged such a thing and _never_ told Bucky that he’d never been uncomfortable with him watching, that his squirming then had more to do with his Catholic Guilt and their strict stance on sex in general.

Bucky, despite all his talk, never told Steve that he’d enjoyed watching him more than most of what he’d done with dames, the exception being when he went down on them. Bucky thought that perhaps he just liked to make people make noise, because he _loved_ when Steve’s breathes would hitch just slightly and he would moan so _filthily_.

Bucky did not feel at all guilty that he’d stopped going to confessions after moving in with Steve, because even before, he’d been only, at best, telling half his sins, but after, he doubted the priest would keep his sacred covenant and not tell somebody about his unnaturalness. He certainly never told Steve that he only went to church when Steve dragged him there on those rare Sundays.

Steve certainly never told Bucky that he was fine with him not going because he didn’t believe anymore, but wanted him to go with him so that he wasn’t nabbed by that one priest that his mother had told him to be leery of, told him to always keep an eye on when the man was near children. Steve was pretty sure that if he’d had, that Bucky would not have let him return to church, and probably found a way to make that priest _disappear_.

Steve certainly never told him that when one of the younger boys on their new street had flinched during church after being looked at by that priest, shame and guilt and fear flashing across his young face, that he’d put his knife skills to use and made the priest _disappear_ himself, the boy’s father angry and carrying a bat coming across him standing over the body with a bloody knife and then helping him get the body into the bay.

Steve also never told him that most of the reason he’d continued to go to church was to pray for Bucky’s soul, pray that after he died and his soul was found wanting, that he forgave Bucky for his doubting and let the other man join his mother.

Steve later thought that since the two of them had very little concept of what personal space between them was when out of sight, that perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised that there wasn’t awkwardness between them. That really, they’d always never had any personal space between them.

There had been no hesitation between them, not even when Bucky slept in the same bed as Steve had. Even prickly as he was, Steve hadn’t protested (much) about being manhandled into the bed to play the Little Spoon to Bucky’s Big Spoon, pulled tight to the other boy’s broadening chest.

Much, _much_ later, Steve would figure out that this wasn’t the behavior of two best friends.

Much, _much_ , much later, Steve would be bluntly told that they’d been nothing less than co-dependent, dangerously so considering how danger had meant so little to either of them. Not that he cared; they were Bucky-and-Steve, Steve-and-Bucky. Even when he’d had nothing, he’d had Bucky, and he wouldn’t give Bucky up for the world. He would _always_ choose Bucky, and he knew Bucky felt(/had felt) the same.

~

_He didn’t know long it had been since he’d become the Asset, but as he slept, new memories had started to come in to stay._

_He knew on some level despite that he’d forgotten Steve every time he’d been awake, and made to forget every time before he slept in ice, that his new memories were not completely wiped._

_The_ Солдат _did not forget. He remembered every mission, remembered all the training and torture they went through. The Body always remembered what was allowed and not allowed, what brought them punishment, but the_ Солдат _remembered more. The_ Солдат _knew the whos, the whats, the wheres, even the whys._

 _He knew the_ Солдат _was angry. Even beneath the flat tone and rigid discipline, there was anger. The_ Солдат _planned for the day it would serve the_ True _Handler, who would not treat them as disposable, would wield them as the precision instrument they were and take their tactical suggestions and allow them to be more efficient. The_ Солдат _had picked through enough of his memories to see that even if was not always apparent, the_ True _Handler always listened to his suggestions in battle, usually incorporated them even when small, then when big, allowed them to act as the sword to their shield._

 _The_ Солдат _made plans, leading up to the_ Plan.

 _That became very evident to him when he was given a memory of the_ Солдат _._

_The Body was somewhere cold, breathe misting the air._

_In front of them was a red-haired girl, perhaps a teen. She was small, as big as Steve was in many of his fragmented memories. Even if her body was young, her eyes were old._

_She moved with the same graceful violence the Body had been trained into, and she wore a mask to hide the emotions she still felt._

_He could see the anger in her eyes as she glanced at the people watching them as they spared._

_The_ Солдат _found this perfect. The_ Солдат _also was fond of her, called her Дочь just as much as he said “Паучонок”, so he thought that the_ Солдат _also wanted her alive and free of the place they currently were at. He wasn’t sure if the_ Солдат _meant to let him know that she called him Yasha instead of Iakov._

 _He watched as the_ Солдат _spoke softly, lips barely moving and words barely loud enough for her to hear, as he told her how to escape. Told her that she had to do so while he was out on mission so they could not send him after her immediately, and that she get as far away as possible, as quick as possible, then go to ground._

 _He told her that she would know when he was free, that she knew him almost as well as the_ True _Handler, and that she had to trust her instincts, as he had trained her well._

 _He knew why the_ Солдат _had allowed this memory to be shared with him; the_ Солдат _had his own Mission._

~

Steve knew he was proud, it was why even as Bucky earned more than he could drawing, even with the steady income thanks to Ms. Clare, he swore he would pay equal share for their apartment.

Occasionally, he had managed to get a job illustrating posters and lobby cards for the various movies out at any one time, movies that most of the time Bucky had snuck him into. He had loved the silent films, and being black-and-white, he knew that his issues with blues-greens-browns weren’t a problem. With Bucky having labeled his colored pencils – chalks off-limits thanks to his asthma and paints too expensive – so that he knew the gradient shades even without seeing them, he used the ‘artistic vision’ Bucky swore up and down he had, to create posters to those movies. Unfortunately, silent films were becoming replaced with movies with sound, and those were starting to have color. He knew that illustrating for movies would start to become difficult, and that his days illustrating black-and-white were numbered.

It didn’t mean that he didn’t enjoy the movies with color, it just meant that Bucky often spent most of the movie signing into his hand some of the colors that he couldn’t see. He had _loved_ the Wizard of Oz for the color. He was sure Bucky’s hand had cramped at the end of it though.

Despite how Bucky swore every which way that he was talented, that he would pay lots of money, if he’d had it, for a Steve Rodgers original, his drawings just didn’t make a lot of money.

It also didn’t exactly earn him any favors.

More than one fight had been fought about how it made him less of a man that it was the only thing he could do.

Bucky never told him that he’d started several of those fights because he’d heard them say, “besides suck dick or take it up the ass”.

As much as he loved drawing, he needed another job. Only, he was a man and he was getting a little old to be a paperboy when children half his age could do twice as much in half the time, and his job options were limited.

Considering that wearing a dress wasn’t exactly foreign to him, and that for all he was bound and determined to be butch so Bucky wasn’t accused of rooming with a fairy, wasn’t accused of _being_ a fairy, there were jobs that he could do – they just meant he had to be a woman. That was when the neighbor down the hall, Jamie, a woman born as a man, came in handy.

She helped him actually look like a woman, didn’t get mad that he was only doing this so he could earn a little more money when she went through so much trouble and was harassed most days for not being what ‘God intended’. She had smiled, and said that he didn’t look half bad as a woman, and that if he was ever looking for a partner, she would snatch him up in a heartbeat – even if she didn’t already know his heart was set on somebody else and that she was a lot of things, but she wasn’t about to steal somebody else’s fella.

Upon learning a thing or two more than what he’d picked up from his ma or from at the Barnes to pass as a dame, he started going to work at the mills for a shift or two in some of his mother’s dresses. With the high turnover rate, ‘Stephanie Rodgers’ was just another worker, one that if no one recognized her, it wasn’t unusual or all that odd.

He remembered putting on those dresses a lot.

He remembered that Ms. Clare’s girls, when something no longer fit or could no longer be re-hemmed into another outfit, didn’t mind if he took some of the clothes home. His ma had taught him to sew and darn, and with Winifred being a seamstress most jobs just as George Barnes was most often a steelworker, he’d learned a bit about making clothes. More than enough to alter them to fit him and give the allusion of a few assets.

Aside from the job at the mills, which he wasn’t much fond of and took care to make sure that he practiced with his knife to pick locks so that he didn’t end up like his grandmother, who his mother had told him had died when she was his age now in the Triangle Shirt Fire, he took work as a seamstress. He could blame a crooked seam, an uneven thread-line on his inexperience not the fact that his eyesight had always been just a bit blurry, just a bit fuzzy, and not the reason why he squinted slightly to be able to see mostly-clearly.

Considering that most seamstresses could be identified by the fact that they all came to squint after a while, he didn’t think anyone noticed anyway.

It was hard work, and Steve played ignorant to the fact that Bucky did some of his work, his hand steadier and neater, not to mention quicker, because like most children of a seamstress, he had done a fair bit of his mother’s work.

It didn’t even draw any attention, as it wasn’t like he was the only one to have slightly different work.

He never told Bucky about how one of the dames he worked with asked him once on who was helping him, being younger than him and not aware that you didn’t ask, and that he’d blushed. That the blush had drawn the attention of the older dames, who had turned on him with smiles like Winifred’s before she asked a question and knew that you would tell her whether you meant to or not, and that he’d stuttered out his name, thinking of the blue candy ring that he wore on a chain around his neck with his rosary.

He certainly never told Bucky that the women had squealed and gushed over how _cute_ it was that his fella had made him a promise as children. He most certainly did not mention the Claddagh he’d started to wear as Stephanie, the heart turned towards him to tell he was taken, or that he’d noticed that Bucky had started to wear one not long after the same way.

Steve got to hear about Bucky’s dates, but for all he showed them a nice time, some of which he never did more than kiss goodnight, most of their old neighborhood had figured out that the wild, charming, love-them-all Bucky Barnes had found himself with a steady.

He very distinctly remembered in 1935 when Winifred found out, and she point blank asked who his girl was, and Bucky had blushed, something Steve had thought him incapable of doing since they were nine. George Barnes, drunk already, had loudly laughed before he took his plate of food away from the table while saying, “Winnie, leave the boy alone! He’ll tell us when he realizes he’s serious about her,”.

It had been a very uncomfortable dinner after that.

Bucky never told him that he’d confided in Becca that he’d loved his girl for a long while, but he wasn’t sure if she knew they were dating, not that she was seeing anyone else he’d been quick to add when Becca had frowned angrily at the thought of someone two-timing her brother, and he didn’t want to spook her because she thought she wasn’t good enough.

Becca suggested that Bucky starting courting his ‘girl’.

Steve was suspicious about how when he saw Becca next after that awkward dinner, her eyes had sparkled with mischief at him, but she had kept mum. He would later admit to being impressed that she’d resisted at his big blue eyes as he pouted at her, as he’d more than once gotten somebody to cave to him with them, and felt reassured that the girl Bucky and he’d had a hand in helping to be a woman, would do just fine.

It threw him through a bit of a loop when one day, having already been thrown off that morning by how his mother’s dresses fit just a bit better and that some of Becca’s too small clothes were in the closet when he came home from the mills, that on their kitchen table was a sprig and a flower.

A sprig of an arbor vitae and an apple blossom.

He didn’t know then what they meant, but knew they were important – he pressed them in the pages of one of his sketchbooks full of Bucky.

Then when he’d worked with his regular group of other seamstresses, he’d stuck his chin out and boldly asked what the two meant, having had to bring the one to also identify it.

 _Unchanging friendship_ and _preference._

A few days after that, he came home late again, normally getting home before Bucky with his long shifts at the docks, to find another two flowers.

A dwarf sunflower and a peach rose.

The older seamstresses had smiled when he’d asked, eyes soft as they remembered their own youthful love, the younger girl’s eyes sparkling at how somebody was taking the time to send such _romantic_ messages.

 _Admiration_ and _appreciation_.

When he was home late again, and a flower and sprig were waiting for him, Steve started to suspect a pattern.

They never talked about this, but they both knew Steve knew who was leaving the flowers.

This time it was a red morning glory and a sprig of a black popular.

 _Attachment_ and _courage_.

The seamstresses had begun to eagerly look forward to the flowers. They also waxed lyrically about the fact that even if it was spring, that his fella still went out of his way to get these.

Steve almost put an end to it then, bitterly practical about their finances, but Bucky didn’t seem to realize that he’d begun to smile softly when he thought no one was looking. He’d looked so _happy_ , and Steve couldn’t find it in himself to tell Bucky to stop.

He instead found himself enjoying the game of trying to guess what would come next, the other dames spending most of their shifts with him looking more lively and invested in what would come next then him. Steve didn’t try to come home late, as it was a gamble when Bucky would get off early enough to beat him home, but he no longer rushed home as if it was the end of the world not getting their dinner started before Bucky got home.

And just because some days he would come home to a pair of flowers, it didn’t mean he got in any less fights – wearing a dress meant _less_ fights, not no fights, and that he fought dirty from the get-go, even winning a fight or two that way, without Bucky having to step in – or that he didn’t get sick. He got sick, he got asthma attacks, his bones creaked and groaned and Bucky had to massage cream into his joints so he didn’t wake up as stiff as a board. He still did what illustration work he could get, still worked at Ms. Clare’s in the evenings accompanied by Bucky, still had Sunday dinners with the Barnes.

It just meant that some days, Stephanie would get flowers from her fella, and that Steve would smile for days, looking at the growing number of flowers that would get pressed in his sketchbooks. It also meant that he drew Bucky with expressions that he had only hoped he’d saw.

Bucky still went on dates every once in a while, because for all Stephanie was his steady, he couldn’t bring her home to his ma because his ma wasn’t stupid and would recognize Steve, and he had to pretend he still hadn’t realized. He still talked and had no shame.

It just meant that Steve thought that perhaps all those _Punk_ s he heard, were perhaps _I love you_ s, like his _Jerk_ was.

They never spoke of how Stephanie was Steve.

If Steve dreamed of the day that he could loop his arm through Bucky’s arm, sometime in a dress, sometimes in pants, that was his dream to take to the grave.

Bucky never told him that he dreamed of the day he could have both Stephanie and Steve, and could yell from the rooftops to the whole world that Steve was his just as he was Steve’s.

They never spoke of how that line they’d known they’d been skirting, or at least been aware of, had been crossed. Quite firmly.

They both knew without speaking that for all the lines they’d crossed, for how much they were clearly across the line, that they would not get much farther.

Hanging over their heads was Steve’s bad health, at how for all the doctors kept telling them it was a miracle Steve still lived, the two of them had no hope that Steve would live to thirty.

Hanging around their necks like a noose was how if they crossed that final line, that for all that was bad about men liking other men, as long as they didn’t commit sodomy, nothing was illegal.

Neither spoke of the death of the mafia man, and Steve never told of the death of the pedophile priest, but going to prison for murder was very different than going in as a convicted fairy. Prison would not be kind to either of them, but it would be nothing compared to if the rest of the prison thought they were fairies. Steve would not survive it, health too frail and spirit too strong; Bucky was sure he wouldn’t come out human.

Steve remembered thinking that if he could have Bucky’s heart, that as long as he had Bucky by his side for as long as he remained on the earth, he could be happy. That he didn’t need anything else.

He remembered thinking that he would enjoy this bit of fun.

Bucky never told him that he would have traded everything but Steve himself to have him for the rest of his life, so that Steve could remain by his side past his predicted expiration date. That this bit of fun was the least he would do.

Bucky never told him after he saw that first smile in 1924, that after his eyes had lit up hearing his nickname, that he loved him before he’d even understood what love was.

Never told him that after he’d seen that soft smile upon crooked lips after finding out what the arbor vitae and apple blossom meant, that he would have continued this game forever just to see that smile.

~

 _The_ Солдат _couldn’t hide his pride, his smugness, even though his exhaustion and how electricity ran through him even hours after the Chair, after the Body was put on ice._

 _The_ Солдат _didn’t need to say that his precious spiderling had escaped._

 _He wasn’t sure how long it had been since the_ Солдат _had showed him that memory, told him of his own Mission, through the flash of a young woman, fully grown with grey-green eyes, hair like red flame, told him that it had been at least several years._

 _The_ Солдат _also didn’t need to say that because she’d followed his orders, leaving when he’d been elsewhere, she’d gone somewhere he couldn’t follow._

_Wouldn’t find for her sake._

_Didn’t need to say that they’d been recalled back from wherever the Body had been sent to train spiderlings in the art of the_ Солдат _, and was being mind-wiped._

_The Body was at least._

_He had known little about what the Body had done since the_ Солдат _had come into being, and the Chair only truly hurt the_ Body _thanks to the vague glowing blue box that he vaguely remembered coming across while being tortured in the Before._

 _The_ Солдат _chose then to tell him what he’d figured out – that since he’d begun to remember, never to forget again, the Body had also begun to remember, the more the longer they’d remained from the Chair. That every time they went in the Chair, the Body began to grow resistant to the damage done to it, particularly as the_ Солдат _had managed to damage the power source for the Chair on the sly and the Chair wasn’t sophisticated enough to tell as long as it worked, and memories would begin to come to the Body. That once the Body began to remember how to remember and didn’t forget each time, it would begin to remember easier, faster, each time._

_Eventually, the threat of the Chair would be nothing._


	4. An End is Just a Beginning of Something New

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where one door closes, a window opens.

_There were moments when he was more aware, not when he remembered being in the ice but just before he remembered, that he thought for all he’d walked fearlessly into death’s embrace, even perhaps ran eagerly if he was honest, that it was his rage that kept him alive._

_For all everyone had touted that he was a ‘good man’, that when thousands were being unwillingly drafted that he’d volunteered, no one had ever asked him why he’d been so desperate to sign up even when he knew there was no way he would have been taken as he was._

_Everyone always assumed it was because he wanted to do what was right. In the beginning, that may have been it, but once Bucky had gotten that ‘Dear John’ letter and been drafted, it had been something else entirely. Desperate to fight, not for his country, not to protect all those threatened by the axis powers, not to free all those oppressed people. Desperate to protect one man; to end the war before that one man became just another victim in the fields of bodies Hitler sat his throne on._

_He had never hidden that desire to protect Bucky – that he’d gone off the reservation at just the possibility Bucky was a POW, if not dead, dived behind enemy lines alone with a wooden shield and a chorus girl’s helmet at that possibility, was something most everyone could tell you._

_No one had ever asked what would have happened if he’d finally managed to join the war, even as skinny little asthmatic him, only to find out Bucky was dead._

_He would have_ proudly _said that he would have burned the world alive to avenge Bucky,_ proudly _said that he would have challenged any god that held Bucky’s soul to get it back, and held the scorched earth behind him as tribute._

_He thought that the other Howling Commandos had remembered Bucky saying that he’d been fifty pounds of rage in a ten-pound bag just waiting for a spark to set it off after he’d seen for himself what war did to people, that day they’d returned without Bucky, because he’d felt their support at his back even as there was rage in his eyes, as he’d hunted down Schmitt._

_He knew that if he hadn’t driven that plane into the ice two weeks later, that he would have made the world burn as he hunted for Bucky’s body after Phillips hadn’t been able to find it._

_He thought that the rage that kept him alive burned still so that he could awake and burn and salt the earth underneath the claws of the monster who’d killed Bucky, burn the monster out from the pages of history. He almost hoped that Hydra hadn’t been dismantled just so that he could turn that rage on a target, turn that rage on its_ rightful _target._

_Even if he remembered nothing else from his time in his ice, he was determined to remember that if upon waking, that he found even a whiff of Hydra, that the rage he’d fostered, he would set loose on the world that had taken Bucky from him and then bargain the gods the lives he ended for just one soul to be returned_ _._

_Anyone who’d known them could have told you in a heartbeat that Bucky would have laid the world to waste if anyone had killed him, and that no one should be surprised that he would _do so.__

_They weren’t going to wake the good man Dr. Erskine had sworn he was; they would wake the beast whose draconic mate had been taken from them._

1935 and ’36 passed quickly. More flowers appeared for Stephanie.

These ones, the seamstresses decided, were all his fella describing the qualities he saw in him.

Cloves and an amaryllis. _Dignity_ and _pride_. Canary grass and cedar. _Perseverance_ and _strength_. Monkshood and mercury. _Chivalry_ and _goodness_. Allspice and chervil. _Compassion_ and _sincerity_. Crocus saffron and meadow lychnis. _Mirth_ and _wit._ Bluebell and cress. _Constancy_ and _stability_. Chamomile and oak leaved geranium. _Energy in adversity_ and _true friendship_. Fraxinella and white oak. _Fire_ and _independence._ Bearded crepis and snowdrops. _Protection_ and _hope_. Lucern and lupine. _Life_ and _vicariousness_. Cranberries and a mandrake. _Hardiness_ and _rarity_.

In 1937, Stephanie started training as a nurse, cutting back on his hours at the mill.

Steve didn’t question Bucky where he worked to get his money occasionally, not even as he cleaned the blood from his clothes.

There were more flowers – these were decided to be the things his fella was offering.

Circaea and a purple rose. _Fascination_ and _enchantment_. Juniper and alstroemeria. _Protection_ and _loyalty_. A mezereon and a red peony. _Desire to please_ and _devotion._ Holly and coral honeysuckle. _Domestic happiness_ and _generous and devoted affection_. Frankincense and wild geranium. _Faithful heart_ and _steadfast piety_. Ivy and a yellow rose. _Fidelity_ and _happiness_.

In 1938, Stephanie no longer worked as a seamstress, working fully as a nurse, but still came to assist the other dames.

There were still more flowers – the seamstresses considered how he blushed and showed another pair of flowers to be the highlight of their day, and gossiped that his fella was telling him what he saw when he looked at him.

Burgundy and fennel. _Unconscious beauty_ and _worthy of all praise_. American cowslip and a peach. _Divine beauty_ and _your qualities, like your charms, are unequaled_.

A carved oak spoon with a celtic knot showed up one day, and Steve couldn’t have helped the laugh that boiled up at the sight. Bucky had watched with a soft look as he admired the work that had been put into carefully inlaying the knot design into the wood, knowing that this was his official courtship gift.

They didn’t speak of how as long as their spoon lasted, neither would make or accept another suit.

Bucky stopped dating dames completely after this, not that he’d gone out on many dates the last four years.

The dames had gotten him so familiar with the language of flowers, that he didn’t need their assistance to read Bucky’s gifts anymore, even if he still told them after each pair showed up.

Coreopsis and Indian jasmine. _Love at first sight_ and _I attach myself to you_. Dodecatheon and flax. _You are my divinity_ and _the color of my fate_. A branch of a plum tree and a primrose. _Keep your promise_ and _I can’t live without you_. Purple pansy and milkvetch. _You occupy my thoughts_ and _your presence softens my pains_. Melianthus and forget-me-not _. Love sweet and secret_ and _true love, forget me not_. A green branch of a locust tree and a pink carnation. _Affection beyond the grave_ and _I will never forget you_.

Even as Bucky left flowers, they weren’t the only signs of affection that he could see.

Dresses showed up in their closet. Better fitting, thicker so he was always warm. Knitted things that he would swear were from Becca if anyone asked. Nice underthings that he started to wear most days.

Instead of dates with dames, Bucky took him out to jazz clubs in Harlem. They would drink at Ms. Clare’s, in the back with the girls.

They never spoke of the times after September 1939, when stories of war in Europe reached them, and things got tense in their neighborhood.

Winifred’s family got jumpy, and Steve felt like he finally understood why George had wanted the Jewish in the house kept quiet. Not after some of the extended Eckerstein family sent them letters from Poland, that Jews were being rounded up there after Germany invaded.

Steve felt like even if they didn’t oppose Germany, that America had a duty to make it clear that those fleeing Germany’s hands were welcome here. Bucky got a tight look on his face and stayed quiet as he ranted.

Later, he realized how uncomfortable Bucky was. That he had known that America would have stayed out of the war if they could have, and that he would have never left if he’d had a choice.

Only, that old fire, always burning so bright against injustice, wanted to stand up to the bullies.

If he hadn’t been leaving Bucky behind, he knew that Stephanie would have been signing up in a heartbeat to volunteer as a nurse overseas.

After December 7th, 1941, war had come to them.

He remembered their arguments, of him wanting to enlist, nearly begging Bucky to help him prepare, and for Bucky pleading that he stay in Brooklyn, to help that way if he had to help.

He remembered Bucky putting in the extra hours before dawn and after dusk, more than anyone, all but sleeping at the docks or the suddenly churning war factories. He remembered Bucky had wanted to make himself indispensable, so that he would be excused from joining the boys that went in droves overseas. He knew that Bucky had not been afraid of serving, but they had seen what it had done to George, how it had driven him to drink, had heard the nightmares the older man still had twenty years later. War had made a broken man of his father, one who often drunk too much and seemed scared of his own shadow some days.

Steve had known then that Bucky had not wanted that to happen to either of them, but that old fire burned to join the fight.

He couldn’t tell Bucky it wasn’t just because of that need Bucky said he had to make things right; he had heard the whispers of who Hitler was rounding up – and Bucky was a poster child for them. Jewish, Roma, borderline homosexual.

All he could think of was what could have happened if any of Bucky’s grandparents hadn’t come to America, and had remained in Europe, now embroiled in war.

Germany seemed determined to go to war with all its neighbors, breaking the non-aggression pact it had formed with Russia and trying to invade.

Steve couldn’t get the idea of Bucky, standing armed in the snow fighting the Germans and being forced to retreat and burn his own city behind him, out of his head. Couldn’t get the idea of Bucky being registered as a Jew, and then being disappeared in the middle of the night, out of his head.

All he could think about was Bucky being put in a concentration camp, and being tortured, tested on, killed.

He had gone out the day after Pearl Harbor to try and enlist, and had been denied outright.

Bucky had been waiting outside the enlistment center, ready to pick up his spirits with a bottle of coke and a small lop-sided smile as if he hadn’t just tried to enlist.

Steve remembered that he hadn’t been able to look at Bucky with his guilt about failing and his relief at not leaving Bucky.

He remembered not sleeping at all that night, staring at the wooden spoon in his hand and thinking he’d failed Bucky.

He remembered drawing with the girls at Ms. Clare’s posters for the war effort. He remembered that he’d worked on sewing together the uniforms for soldiers with the other seamstresses.

He remembered trying a second time with a different name at a different enlistment center.

Bucky had been waiting outside there too.

They did not speak of how his lungs rattled and he’d started to cough like his mother had in the beginning.

Bucky would whisper into his shoulder when he thought he was asleep that he wished that Steve wasn’t so desperate to die, because otherwise he may live for another couple of years.

Steve pretended not to hear that, mind full of how he knew that Bucky would go to war sooner or later, and that he refused for Bucky to go without him.

He remembered the day the new draft finally caught up to Bucky, and how ashen he’d turned.

The night before Bucky had shipped out for basic, they crossed that final line, voices desperate and hands grasping at whatever they could reach, knowing that this may be the last night they could do this.

Bucky left while Steve slept.

He left a new branch of a plum tree on their table, a reminder that _he was with him until the end of the line_.

Steve carved a spoon from the branch, inlaying it with a celtic knot. He had wanted it done so that when Bucky returned from basic before he shipped out, that he could carry their promise with him as an eternal reminder.

Then he tried to enlist a third time.

He remembered imaginings of Bucky’s blood face surrounded by death filling his thoughts as he tried to enlist again.

~

_He remembered that Steve had been small most of his life._

_He remembered Steve getting big._

_It confused him. He didn’t remember details of how he got big. When was a question he’d stopped asking with his scrambled brains._

_For some reason, he never completely forgot the why._

_He remembered Steve always rushing in to right some wrong. He remembered how Steve’s eyes had blazed when he found out about some wrong._

_He remembered how while that fire was there, that it was . . darker on occasion, that occasion. He didn’t think he ever found out why truly, but he remembered that for Steve, this was personal, and it was do-or-die for him._

_The_ Солдат _had been something almost smug as he told him it was because the_ True _Handler had a Mission; to protect him._

 _The_ Солдат _approved of the fire he saw in the_ True _Handler, approved of how he would burn the world alive after he found out about the capture of the Body. He approved because a_ True _Handler knew not just how to exactly use their asset, knew not just when to pull them out before they became broken, but also would protect their asset, remember that for all they wore the cloaks of monsters, they were human._

~

Steve had counted down every moment of the six weeks Bucky was at basic.

He had hated being alone in that apartment again, and despised that Bucky would come back for one night before he was shipped out. Gone for an indeterminate amount of time after.

He had been very resolved to not tell Bucky that he’d seen the Morrigan twice in the last two weeks of this new moon, and that he was sure that he would see her a third time in a matter of days.

He would never tell Bucky that the day after Bucky had left, he’d seen the Morrigan. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen her again that moon, her message had been abundantly clear: his life would not last much longer.

He would never tell Bucky that whatever sickness his mother had had, that he was sure he had it now too.

He had seen specks of blood in his hand after one coughing fit.

He had known that he wouldn’t survive to see Bucky come home for good.

He had been determined to not let Bucky know this, and just as determined that he get overseas after Bucky and make sure that the jerk made it home even if _he_ didn’t come back to Brooklyn.

Bucky would be home for one night, and he was determined that he make the best of the last time he would see him. The money he’d been saving didn’t mean anything to him anymore, and he would see to it that Bucky’s last night in Brooklyn was something to remember.

It was why he had been on his way to the grocer, intending to get sweets – Bucky had not _a_ sweet tooth, but a mouth full of _sweet teeth_ truly – and a couple of packs of Lucky Strikes for Bucky. Bucky would go through most of his sweets before he left after having been forced to go without even a single piece a day for the last six weeks, and not allowed to smoke, forced to go cold turkey after having smoked at least once a day for years, would have him smoking at least one before he left.

Turning the corner just a street away, almost able to see the shop, had been when he’d heard a fight.

Steve would never get the chance to tell Bucky that he would have walked past that fight, if he hadn’t heard a woman say very clearly, “Back off! Leave me alone!”.

He hadn’t been able to make out much of the fight out before that, but hearing her distress, he hadn’t been able to keep walking by like everyone else on the street was. He ran into the little side-street to see a much larger man man-handling a woman with strawberry blonde hair half-a-head taller than him, his hands groping at her clothes trying to remove them.

The woman saw him, saw his smaller frame and could see that he would only get hurt trying to help, and tried to get him to leave with her eyes, but he didn’t see it as he yelled out at the man, “Hey! Leave the lady alone!”.

The man turned his head to look at who would dare yell at him, and laughed when he saw the scrawny little punk with blazing blue eyes, “You can have your turn with this whore after me, kid,”.

If the man had spent any time in Brooklyn, he would have heard of Steve Rodgers, and how he’d been born angry, would yell through his wheezing lungs loud enough your ma and God could hear him, telling you exactly what you’d done wrong, and that if you didn’t heed that moral compass, then you would deal with Bucky Barnes. Only he hadn’t.

Otherwise he might have expected the smaller man to kick at the back of his knee so that he fell down a bit, having to let go of the woman to catch himself, might have expected the punch that flew toward his face once he was low enough down the smaller man could reach.

Not that either hit stunned him for long.

Steve hurriedly grabbed the woman’s hand and pulled her out of range of the larger man, “Hurry, get away!”, just before his shoulder was grabbed and a fist made contact with his face.

He went down for a moment, and dazedly saw the woman he’d been trying to rescue punch the man who’d been hassling her, knocking _him_ down before stepping on him with her heel firmly on his throat, “I told you to back off Freddie. Leave us alone, or I’ll do worse next time.”. Then she stood next to him and held out a hand, a hand that held a wedding ring, “Thanks for the assist, I’m Virginia Potts, and you are?”.

He tried to smile, but he tasted blood and thought better of it, “It was no problem Ma’am, and my name is Steve Rodgers,”.

Before anything else could be said, they heard voices coming their way, “Hey, you think Freddie got that dame? He promised us a fun time with her.”, and she grabbed Steve’s hand and pulled him after.

She didn’t let go until they were in front of an apartment block, and she had pulled him inside with her into one of the rooms.

She made an anxious noise as he fought to even out his breathing, patting at his pockets and realizing that he’d left his asthma smokes on his bedside table, watching as she started to go through her drawers, “I don’t mean to be rude, but with my husband overseas, my mother insisted I stay in this ladies’ henhouse if I didn’t want to move home, and we’re not allowed male visitors. I don’t think those men will look kindly upon you once Freddie comes around and tells them about you helping me, and I would rather like you to stay alive after your gallant rescue.”.

He blamed his asthma for how when she pulled out a pale yellow dress that was obviously too small for her, that he’d only blinked and didn’t react like he was supposed to after realizing what she meant to do.

He remembered making a note to smack Bucky later when he heard his snickers in his head at the situation, just knowing that if Bucky had seen this, he _would_ be snickering, before promising himself he would never speak of this again.

He didn’t fight her suggestion though, simply sighed as he held out a hand for the dress.

He turned red as while he started to pull his shirt from his trousers, she didn’t look away. Virginia raised an eyebrow at him, but turned away for his ‘modesty’, “I _am_ married, you know. You wouldn’t be the first man I’ve seen naked,” and he pulled his trousers down to stand in feminine undergarments without a brassier.

He lived with Bucky, who had no shame, and thus he didn’t exactly have much shame himself. It hadn’t been so much modesty that had made him start to blush, as that he hadn’t wanted her to see that while he’d worn a man’s shirt and trousers, he’d been otherwise dressed as a dame did. That more often than not, it had been habit to dress as Stephanie. Today had been no exception.

Slipping into the dress, even with his too thin knobby shoulders, lack of chest or hips, strong jaw and short hair, he’d known how to tighten his belt around his waist to give the illusion of a flair of hips, knew how to pull his shoulders back to push out his chest without aggravating his back. Knew that the dark stockings on his legs hid his thin, nearly absent leg hair, gave his legs a more feminine look as he stepped back into his shoes. Chewing a little on his bottom lip to give it the appearance of rouge as he fluffed out his hair, he knew exactly how to make his scrawny frame look almost feminine enough that it could fool people when he wore a dress.

Virginia looked thoughtfully at him for a moment, having come to the realization that he wasn’t so much a man who wanted to be a woman, but a skinny man who’d learned how to be a woman to get work he otherwise wouldn’t be given.

Steve never found out that she’d seen his ring on his rosary, saw the Claddagh ring next to it.

She never told his secret to anyone; years later when her granddaughter, a girl who looked her younger twin, sat on her knee, she told her of a man who didn’t let his size hold him back, who had dressed as a woman to work, who would have found a way, any way no matter how, to follow his fella to war.

When the girl had asked if he had, she smiled as she’d whispered that he had. That he had fought all the odds to fight alongside his fella.

Her eyes had been sad as she said that when she’d found out about Bucky Barnes’ fall, that she had known Steve Rodgers hadn’t been long for the world without him.

Steve would not find out for a very long time that Pepper Potts had learned her stubbornness, determinedness, the spine of steel that had kept her as Tony Stark’s assistant when everyone else quit, from her grandmother’s story of him.

Virginia helped him leave there unnoticed, and he’d escaped back to the apartment he’d been sharing with Bucky after a quick stop at the grocer’s for his original errand.

He had changed out of the dress and carefully put it away, remembered that he had made plans to find a way to thank her, then had changed into some of Bucky’s things.

He remembered having done so because he had finally succumbed to the want to carry Bucky’s scent with him, having resisted after those first few days without Bucky, but he had thought _fuck it_. It wasn’t like anyone would really be able to tell anyway, most of his own clothes were too big on him, so no one would find anything odd about it either.

He remembered going back out, with half the intention of looking for some quick work to get for after Bucky left again, when Freddie found him.

He was blindsided as he rounded a corner, knocked down flat before being dragged into an alley. Dazed, and his nose bleeding, he had scrambled backwards until his hand had hit a metal trash can lid.

He remembered struggling to stand up but determined not to stay down. That he’d hefted the heavy metal lid up in front of him like a shield and had ran at Freddie, making sure to hoist it above his head to catch the fists coming down before getting in one good punch to the other man’s junk.

While the other man had been winded, a name had escaped him before he’d been able to curtail it, “Bucky!”.

Because Bucky had told him that anytime he got into a fight that he doubted he could win on his own, he should call for him, and by the count of ten, that his back-up, never a rescue, would be there. Had told him that he would be there regardless, thanks to his _oh-my-God-Steve-No!_ sense that was telling him that he was making checks his body couldn’t cash and always knew when he was needed, but the call was his cue to come help, never to interfere.

_1_

He remembered that Bucky liked to joke that while he had a ( _fucking_ ) fantastic sense of direction for being able to navigate the twisting mess of a maze of streets that was known as New York with ease, that he had an even better sense of Steve-direction. That other ( _fucking boring_ ) men could tell you where North was ( _not that I damn can’t, you Punk_ ), but that he was special, and could tell you where _Steve_ was.

_2_

The other man recovered, knocking aside his make-shift shield as he had once again thought about _why_ Bucky had wanted him to yell for him when he was in trouble, not that he doubted his friend’s claims in the slightest, in this matter anyway ( _I’m tellin’ ya Stevie, the neighbors down the street are devil-worshipers!_ Buying rats _! Should be buying_ cats _!_ ).

He was knocked to the ground, ears ringing as he thought that maybe Bucky just wanted him to admit once and a while that he could rely on him (I can do this on my own _–_ _You don’t have to_ ).

_3_

Freddie had just raised a foot to stomp down on his chest when a dark blur flew into him with a snarl, “Get the fuck off Steve!”.

Steve half-wondered as he watched Bucky beat up Freddie, why he had never gotten past five in his little count before.

Bucky never told that he tended to follow him around, that he couldn’t help but check every alleyway he passed to see if he was there being beaten up, that he’d enlisted half the neighborhood to send someone for him if he was at work and Steve got into a fight.

Steve didn’t deny that there was definitely some vicious satisfaction and admiration happening as he watched the one-sided fight. Vicious satisfaction that Bucky had _never_ failed to come when he truly needed it.

Freddie was learning what the whole of Brooklyn had learned by the time they were fifteen – you fuck with one, the other would pound you into the ground.

He never told Bucky that watching him physically beat those who would seriously hurt him or worse made his blood hot.

It was while he was _admiring_ the feral grace that was Bucky fighting that he saw one of Freddie’s friends from earlier throw an empty beer bottle at Bucky’s head. He chucked the metal lid at the projectile without thinking, didn’t stay still long enough to see the garbage lid knock the bottle off course to slam into the brick to Bucky’s right before he was launching himself at the other man.

Steve remembered how beautiful the surprise on the man’s face was as he went down, tackled to the ground by fifty pounds of rage in a ten-pound bag, as Bucky liked to call him.

It was almost as beautiful as the feral look on Bucky’s formally neatly groomed face, wisps of hair escaping its slicked back look to flutter in front of his dark eyes, as he was gently pulled off the man, kicking and snarling, fists swinging to try and give the downed man a second shiner to complete his new look. Bucky held onto the back of his shirt as he nudged the fallen man with his nice and clean military shoes, “Get the fuck going already, before I let this damn punk loose to finish the job.”.

He remembered thinking that the man was lucky that his anger had not cleared quick enough to remember his switchblade before Bucky had pulled him off.

He remembered the dark appreciation that had flashed across Bucky’s face at seeing the other man run away from _him_ , leaving a groaning Freddie behind in the alley.

The fighting-flush on Bucky’s cheeks distracted him from seeing the possessive appreciation that came to his face at seeing Steve in _his_ too-big clothes.

Bucky looped one arm around his skinny shoulders as he led them away from the alley, squeezing just a smidgen too tight as if to remind both of them that the other was still there, “Dammit Steve, I mean, really? Any time I’m gone for than five minutes, you go and pick fights.”.

It was only thinking back that Steve noticed the older man that had been watching them contemplatively, and recognized him.

Bucky had sighed when he had puffed out his chest, jaw set, “He was trying to force a dame into _fondueing_ earlier. I stepped in, and BAM! She laid him out flat. He just recognized me from earlier.”.

He didn’t see how Bucky’s eyes had narrowed and he tossed a dark look back at the alley, thinking of what he would have done if he’d interrupted instead of Steve, of what he would do if he ever came across the man again.

Bucky never told him that he had come across the man later, in a foul mood.

Steve never told him that when he found out about Freddie’s sudden _disappearance_ later, he’d known what had happened and said nothing.

Bucky instead pulled Steve closer, making the blonde match his stride, as he threw dirty looks at anyone that dared to look too long at them for being two guys so close, “Just couldn’t leave the bullies alone, could ya?”.

Steve never told him he saw some of those people pale and quickly cross the street away from them, how there was naked fear in their eyes at seeing Bucky with ring tattoos on his right hand, telling them of his affiliation even if they couldn’t see the tattoos – that _he_ had done for him – across his chest and shoulders.

Bucky was pleased when Steve didn’t throw his arm off even as he puffed out his chest some more, as it was often a very fine line between Steve thinking he was proud of him, and Steve thinking he was about to be lectured for picking fights, and often times Steve’s Catholic Guilt made him hear lecture before he even got his lecture.

Steve never told Bucky that he knew about how tried to walk that line, but he was unable to let bullies go unchallenged. He had worked hard to put things in his favor after years of prowling Brooklyn so that he came across fewer and fewer bullies after it got around that he would fight like an angry weasel out of a bag with no compunction about fighting dirty, so that his fights were mostly scuffles Bucky didn’t even get a chance to interfere in before they realized who they were fighting. He’d worked hard to only tell Bucky of the fights that would make the other man proud.

Bucky never told him he knew about Steve coming across fewer and fewer bullies, because those that lost to Steve and would go after the punk again, he made sure to introduce to his fists. Depending on the damage Steve got, some weren’t able to limp away, had to crawl away with broken legs.

Bucky let the little shit think he’d won those fights with his own fearsomeness, not the monster that bayed for blood whenever _Steve_ came back bloody and proud.

They both knew Bucky knew about those scuffles of Steve’s, but if he played ignorant so he could swoop in when Steve (inevitably) got into a fight he wouldn’t win, that was his business.

It made things easier for Bucky if Steve thought he was being sneaky when he’d stopped being able to pull one over him when they were nine, because Steve would have gone out and learned new, better tactics. He had been the one to teach the little shit to get caught in little lies so he could hide bigger ones, proud of the little shit for sticking to the letter of questions instead of the spirit so he could lie to their faces for questions like why they lived in a queer neighborhood.

Bucky never told Steve about his tell of shifting to the left, and Steve never told him he had never squashed that tell for him.

When Bucky hit his mental count of twenty, he reluctantly let Steve go from his grip so no one questioned how deep their friendship actually went – didn’t need to start rumors when he wouldn’t be there to stomp them down – even if he didn’t let the punk go more than a step or two away. Steve’s ability to find and attract trouble was too good to let him go far when he could keep him close.

If his favored way of reigning the blond in was to grasp one of his belt loops and lightly grope at his panty-covered ass as he did so, that was something he would take to his grave.

Steve hip-checked him when he’d been quiet too long for the punk’s tastes, grinning up at him like he was the only thing in the world worth looking at, “Where we going Buck?”.

He returned the smile when he was sure no one had saw, that no one was looking, as he didn’t need anyone thinking they were queer after all, “To the future.”.

Neither would ever put to words what they saw in each other faces, having spent too long telling themselves that whatever feelings they had was just their imagination between Steve and Bucky, desperate hope that had spilled over between Stephanie and Bucky.

He remembered laughing at Bucky’s words, then nudging him in the side, “Where you jerk?”.

Bucky had laughed as well, “The Stark Expo, you cheeky punk.”.

As the icy water had first filled his lungs, he had thought back to a million moments like this where they had cheekily traded a ‘Jerk’ and a ‘Punk’, and thought that yes, this was the closest they’d ever get to outright saying ‘I love you’ to each other’s faces.

A couple of pretty ladies approached Bucky the moment they got amongst the crowd gathering on the West Side for the Stark Expo, sidling up on either side of him and wrapping an arm around each of his elbows like they were his dates, “Hey soldier boy, want some company for the evening?”.

He remembered the flash of anger he’d felt at being shunted to the side again for a dame, something that he’d gone several years without so it plucked open a partially healed old wound for always being second-best and never enough.

The words he’d wanted to shout a thousand times before at Bucky’s dates, had held in when he’d had no claim, but the claddagh on Bucky’s pinkie should have told them all they needed to know, so the words had bubbled up before he could stop them, “I’m sorry ladies, he’s taken. He has a fiancé, Steph. She would be here, but she begged off after a long day of final certifications to become a nurse overseas.”.

The girls had backed off with a huff, after Bucky had smirked as he raised the hand with his claddagh, “Sorry ladies, Steph doesn’t like to share,”, his eyes alight with something he couldn’t name as he continued to ‘play along’, “She has a beautiful blue ring that fits on her dainty hand, a promise from her childhood I always intended to keep.”.

He remembered the fiery Irish blush that had heated his cheeks at that despite how cold it had been.

Then because he was the little shit Bucky always said he was, he puffed out his chest and looked Bucky straight in his dark gypsy eyes, “But that is just the _gadjo_ way. Where is her necklace of coins? Your father must be disappointed on not seeing somebody with your necklace at your age.”.

Bucky had laughed loudly, a glitter in his eyes that sent a warm thrill through him, an edge to his smile, “I’ll get that necklace of coins then! My best lady deserves to be able to show the world that she is no longer on the market even if we can’t yet get married.”.

He had nudged them through the crowd to a shadowed spot, his large hand a comfortable weight on the back of his neck, a familiar warmth at his back, before he put Steve’s back to the wall as he leaned over him to hide them from curious eyes, “Now, what was this about my best girl signing up to be a nurse for the war effort,”, moving his head close to fill Steve’s sight, “I’m sure _Steph_ has noticed that her mother’s wardrobe was a little more fitted to her petite size over the years. That some of Becca’s things ended up in her closet. My best girl ain’t stupid. She had to know that I had been leaving her gifts for years as she worked in the mills, then as a seamstress like my ma. I know Steph followed her ma’s footsteps and became a nurse.”.

He remembered that Bucky’s dark eyes had been intense, ultra-focused in the way only a marksman could be on their target, before he gave up this game up some, “No women have been drafted, which means _somebody_ volunteered while I was away. What’s this about _Steph_ volunteering?”.

He remembered how Bucky’s eyes had flickered down to Steve’s Adam's apple as he nervously swallowed, voice quiet as he answered but his eyes never faltered from Bucky’s, “I failed enlistment over and over, Bucky, then you were drafted. I ain’t stupid. I know I won’t be surviving the next winter alone, I’ll be hearing the _bean sidhe_ before the Morrigan takes my soul by the end of the next cold front. Your ma already told me that this winter will be tough, and offered for me to move back in so I don’t catch cold without anyone knowing, but it won’t be enough. I know it won’t.”. A small, melancholy smile curled his lips, “I wanted to do some good before the end. Put in papers for Stephanie Rodgers to become a nurse attached to the 107 th, to follow her fiancée. I should get the acceptance letter any day,” before standing up straighter, “One way or another Bucky, I’m following you. We promised ‘til the end of the line, and I’ll see to it that you make it home with me. The Morrigan will have a fight on her hands if she thinks she can take you without me. Brooklyn knows this, the Old Gods will know this too.”.

Bucky’s eyes had closed as he lowered his forehead to Steve’s, some strange sense of grief and pride twisting in his gut at hearing Steve tell him that death was dogging his steps and that he intended to fight not for life, but so that he made it home.

He never told Steve that home was never Brooklyn to him, it was always a person: _him_.

He chuckled softly at Steve’s last words, voice soft with defeat, “’Til the end of the line, you punk. Only you would try to take on Gods and think you can win, Stevie.”.

Bucky never told him that he’d been taking on Death for years, had sent them back seven times, for him.

Then he had stepped back, gesturing an arm out into the crowds behind him, face smiling while his eyes were sad, “Let’s glimpse the future first. The War can wait one night.”, leaving unspoken but heard, ‘Because we have no future of our own to see’.

Steve remembered enjoying that night, even if it had been colored with inevitable sorrow at knowing they would never see this future become a reality, watching Bucky more openly than he ever had, knowing this would likely be the last time he ever saw him.

Seeing Bucky distracted by some fancy Stark tech, so excited to see something real so like the science fiction he liked to read, had been his best memory of the night.

It hadn’t stopped him from slipping away to the recruitment office there though.

He remembered thinking that Bucky would have wanted to be there to pick him back up after he was denied for a fourth time.

Even as his feet had taken him from Bucky, he had regretted moving away, but he’d _had to try_.

He remembered thinking that he _had to_ keep trying until they got so desperate for men that they took him. Remembered thinking that the moment they got him to the European front, that no force in any Hell, Catholic or Celtic or Jewish, would stand in his way to getting to Bucky.

He would never stop trying to get to Bucky. Dead or alive, he _would_ get to Bucky.

He remembered thinking that if he had to single-handedly end the war, he would get Bucky _home with him_.

He had known that his many ailments wouldn’t allow him to succeed this time, but he’d still tried because if he stayed here in Brooklyn, he wouldn’t survive the winter, but that he stood a better chance to live in war and _Bucky needed him_ , alive.

~

 _The_ Солдат _called him forth after he completed their mission but before they returned to their handlers, holding a newspaper with a date: August 8, 1993._

 _The_ Солдат _reminded him that this date had significance to the man he’d once been._

_By this point, he’d remembered a great deal of who he’d been._

_One detail that still escaped him, was his name._

_Dates were still a lost cause, but names of other people, of things, had started to finally come back._

His _name, still eluded him._

 _The_ Солдат _told him that August 8 had been the day he’d been born._

 _The_ Солдат _told him that he’d sprung forth in January 1944._

 _The_ Солдат _told him that they’d broke him the month he’d been created by telling the Body of how Captain America had crashed the_ Valkyrie _into the ice on New Year’s Day._

 _He didn’t know why that had broken him, but it made_ him _hurt. Captain America had meant something to_ him _._

_It reminded him that New Year’s Day was Steve’s birthday._

 


	5. A Death is a Birth Come Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A world is far less defined than thought. Death is not so clear-cut as the end of a life.

_If the rage kept him alive, then the sorrow kept him dead._

_He had nothing but time to go over his failure._

_He had been_ sure _he’d heard the_ bean sidhe _when Bucky had Fallen._

_He had been sure when he’d all but ordered Phillips to search for Bucky’s body._

_He’d wanted to check himself, but Phillips had refused to let him out of the base, saying he didn’t need to see his friend’s broken body ravaged by the cold and animals._

_He had been sure when he’d dropped the_ Valkyrie _into the water._

_Now . . now he doubted._

_Bucky had been the only survivor of Zola’s experiments when he’d had the 107 th. He’d barely been able to keep his feet getting out of the base, but he’d been as close to fine as he could be after being a POW by the time they’d gotten to base._

_Now it froze him down to the core that Bucky could have survived his Fall, and that he could have lay dying for days down there._

_Now he remembered how Hydra had been hunting the Howling Commandos just as much as they hunted Hydra._

_He feared that Hydra had found a dead or dying Bucky._

_The guilt and sorrow still swirled inside him, making his body like lead, but the rage that Bucky, alive or dead, could have become a prisoner of Hydra **again** _ because of him _, burned bright._

_Soon, he would awake._

_The rage burned too bright for him to sleep much longer._

He’d failed to enlist again, but one of the doctors had seen something in him.

He still wasn’t sure what Dr. Erskine had seen in him to make him choose him for the first (and ultimately only) subject of Project Rebirth.

He had heard all the man’s talk about a weak man knowing the value of strength, and that he’d chosen a good man, not a good soldier, but it had never explained why _him_.

He later found out that he’d seen him and Bucky come from the alley where they’d left Freddie groaning and he’d interrupted an attempt at rape earlier, that he couldn’t leave bullies alone.

He remembered wondering if Dr. Erskine had known more about the situation, if he’d talked with pretty much anyone from Brooklyn, had known anything about his temper, if he would have still chosen him.

Dr. Erskine did choose him though, and he didn’t see Bucky again that night.

He never told anyone about wandering the New York streets afterwards that night, trying to pick fights with drunks, just to get Bucky to show up out of the blue like always when he got in over his head. Not that he needed Bucky there, no matter what Bucky said, he wasn’t stupid, he made sure to pick people he could actually take down if he was instigating these fights.

He didn’t call out for Bucky though, afraid of getting to ten and Bucky not showing up. Afraid that it wasn’t that he couldn’t, but that he _wouldn’t_. He had been afraid that Bucky was _truly_ angry at him for trying to sign up again, that he had finally managed to find something to push him away.

He relived their last conversation before they’d split, over and over in his head, playing it again and again to try and find something he’d missed, knowing that Bucky had expected no less than him to go and do something extraordinarily stupid without him there to stop him but regretting that he had been proving him right; _“Don’t be going and being stupid while I’m gone, you punk.”_ “How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you, Jerk.”.

The only thing that had stopped him from leaving New York in the middle of the night to chase after Bucky, was that if Bucky was going to lecture him about doing something astoundingly stupid, he better make it worth it – Bucky expected no less from him after all.

There had been a valid reason why even the nuns of the local Catholic church would take the good Lord’s name in vain when they saw him some days; “Oh my God Steve! No!”.

His favorite instance had been three days after meeting Bucky, and trying to rescue Becca’s cat from the tree in front of the church without knowing who Becca was, and breaking his arm for his trouble. He honestly still didn’t know why Bucky hadn’t run for the hills then, as if that hadn’t given him clear proof at what a trouble magnet little shit he was and that their first meeting hadn’t been a fluke, but Bucky hadn’t run away then, or any time after.

He remembered that Bucky would always laugh and ruffle his hair despite his protests, saying that he’d _always_ been a little shit, then go on to reiterate the exact same speech he gave whenever he had done something that he shouldn’t have done alone. If he tried to protest being a little shit, something he did more to rile Bucky up then an actual protest, he knew better than to think he was anything but, Bucky would counter with half a dozen more stories from that first year alone, that Steve thought were just more proof of why anyone else would have ran, but Bucky said just highlighted what he always called the greatness in him.

Bucky had always called him a punk with too big of a heart, with a spirit too big and indomitable for his frail body, and a temper that put gunpowder to shame with how easy it was to lit and how big it would blow up in your face, too, but he said that he had greatness in spades where ordinary men were lucky to even get a drop to be _good_.

He remembered wondering as he wandered back with a rather impressive shiner to where Dr. Erskine had waited up with a bottle of alcohol just as the sun peeked up over the horizon, if Bucky would laugh or cry if he gave back, word for word, his normal lecture about what a stupid little shit he’d been when out of his sight. If he would pretend to ask the heavens dramatically why he was friends with a punk like him after they had their little reunion and reaffirmation that Steve had survived that long and he wasn’t imagining things.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t had that speech memorized since he was eight.

He remembered wanting to think that Bucky would have laughed at him for being a cheeky little shit.

When they’d met in the aftermath of Azzano, he’d expected the lecture and a variation of, _‘I was fucking gone for five fucking minutes Steven Grant Rodgers! Gone for five damn minutes! And you-‘_ , this time with, _‘_ volunteer _to be a fucking science experiment!’_ , maybe a good smack upside the head for, _‘Going and giving me grey hair early, you punk! Grey hair! You’d ruin my good looks for again being a fucking idiot punk!’_.

That wasn’t exactly what he’d got, but anyone who’d listen, or frankly was just within range of hearing, on the trek back had heard all about the various ‘antics’ he’d gotten up to back in Brooklyn; _‘Fucking dammit Steve! Raiding a fucking base_ alone _behind fucking enemy lines! Were you fucking_ trying _to top my list of stupid shit Steve gets up to when I’m not fucking there to supervise?! Fucking little shit!’._

That proud smile and one-armed hug as Bucky had whispered in his right ear like always during that trek ( _‘I’m so damn proud of you, you fucking punk. Even if you made me the damsel in this story.’_ ) had made every ounce of pain that serum had given him and more, worth it.

Dr. Erskine had simply looked at the quiet devastation on his face as he’d held a half-finished necklace of old pennies and Coke bottle caps that had been left on their kitchen table in place of the plum tree carved spoon, smokes and sweets gone, in his hands with his oak carved spoon, and had said, “That love of yours is strong. They’ll forgive you for leaving. I’m sure they’ll give you hell first, but they won’t stop loving you.”.

Steve wondered now if he’d known about his love for Bucky, or if he had merely suspected that there may have been something between them when he’d watched them earlier that night.

It made him wonder if Dr. Erskine could have known the symbol he’d become, and how ironic that it’d be him that would represent America. It made him wonder if the public had known, if they would have disowned him and would leave him in the ice.

Before he’d shipped out to basic, he had dug up all the things from beneath his floorboard, all his sketchbooks of Bucky, full of their flowers pressed between the pages, had bundled them up in his women’s underthings and his favorite pair of dresses, and given them to Ms. Clare for safe-keeping. When the war was over, he would come retrieve them, but until then, he dared not risk anyone finding out about them.

He remembered that once at basic, that he’d counted down every minute, not looking to make friends, but the others weren’t trying to be his friend either. Any attempt to at least be on friendly terms was rebuffed, and every failure made it just a bit easier for him to think about leaving them all behind the moment he was in Europe.

He remembered how Bucky sent letters to _Stephanie Rodgers_ , postmarked to him as if he was the middle-man defending his sister’s honor by making sure her fella wasn’t sending anything too racy.

They had made his day for each of the three that got through to him while there, bundling them up into one of his socks to carry with him.

He remembered struggling through marches around and around Camp Lehigh, fighting to breathe during exercise, clawing his way through various training grounds. He remembered always being last.

He remembered imagining Bucky doing this all weeks earlier, and excelling at all these without complaint. He could almost hear in his ear Bucky making terrible puns; _‘Buck up Punk’_.

He remembered every night thinking about leaving this all behind, and finding his own way to the battlefield, before he looked at the blue candy ring now on his dog tags beside his rosary around his neck, fingered the half-finished necklace of pennies and bottle caps he had tied around his ankle. Bucky had bemoaned for years that he didn’t know how to run from a fight, and he reminded himself that this was just another fight. He wouldn’t lose this one. Couldn’t afford to lose.

He remembered how every morning the other recruits looked at him in surprise at seeing that he was still there, and that every day he stuck it out, there was just a little more respect in their eyes.

He remembered every day clenching his jaw and pushing himself a little harder, a little more, pushing himself to show them all that Dr. Erskine had made the right choice, that he deserved to go over there just as much as the other men. He remembered pushing himself knowing that Bucky was waiting on the other side, and he just had to make it there.

Steve remembered the day that General Phillips, the soldier attached to supervise Dr. Erskine’s project and who had resented him as the first test subject of Project Rebirth, who had wanted a good soldier to be enhanced, had arranged for him to spar against his preferred candidate. He remembered how Phillips had wanted to sideline him long enough to convince Dr. Erskine that there were better candidates better suited to become the world’s first supersoldier.

He remembered going into that ring, knowing that the odds were all stacked against him.

He remembered the clear surprise on the other guy’s face when instead of immediately bowing out after that first punch, knocked down but not out, not fell upon like they were boxing properly, he had fought to his feet and grinned bloody while throwing up his fists, eyes blazing and defiant, “Is that all you got? I can do this all day,”, before darting forward and getting beneath the other guy’s guard.

He didn’t have the strength to do any real damage, but Bucky had shown him not just the proper way to fight, he’d shown him how to _win_.

Bucky had shown him how you fought against bigger opponents, when they’d both been half the size of Steve’s normal opponents.

He remembered the female acrobat from the circus who had shown him how to use his size and bony knees and elbows, remembered how they’d both drilled it into his head that at his size, there was no fair fights.

He remembered that first fight after Bucky had yelled at him that when it came down to it, it didn’t matter if the fight was won fairly, what mattered was that he came out of it alive, and that if that meant he fought dirty, Bucky had made him promise that he damn would. That if he wouldn’t run, he better damn walk out of there on his own two feet.

He remembered that another fight, when he’d barely been fifteen that he’d lashed out at knee-caps, kicked people in the junk, slammed heads into knees. Not caring if he could have killed some of them. He’d just been beyond vengeful that some fucker had gotten the drop on Bucky after he’d called for him, and he’d wanted them all to _hurt_. Bucky’d had to pull him off one of the older boys before the cops got there, both of them bleeding and limping, but he remembered smiling as Bucky had ruffled his blonde hair with a, _“Good job Punk,”_.

He remembered thinking that for him, there would never be a fair fight. That Bucky was out there in the midst of a war, and he didn’t have the luxury to play nice if it meant the difference between staying stateside or getting to Bucky.

He remembered climbing Johnson to sit on his shoulders behind his neck, getting one hand hooked over the other man’s nose in a threat to jam it up into his skull as he’d lightly pressed both thumbs into the corners of his eyes so he could squish his eyes if needed. He remembered tightening his skinny thighs around his neck as he’d spoken directly at Phillips, who’d been unable to hide his surprise at him still standing let alone having gained the advantage, “Everyone underestimates me because of my size. I grew up in Brooklyn picking fights. He’ll have to beat me bloody and unconscious to keep me down in a fight; that’s what it has taken to _keep me down_.”.

He remembered that particular fight in blurry snippets after being blindsided, nearly knocked unconscious before he could call for Bucky as they kicked and beat at his limp form as it tried to curl up in a ball.

He remembered that somebody had to call for George Barnes to pull the nearly thirteen-year-old Bucky off the other three older boys before he’d killed them, still squirming and swinging to try and get back at their bloody, broken forms to finish the job, as he’d laid staring at a red-eyed crow.

He remembered how as he’d been stuck in the hospital after with a couple of broken ribs that Bucky had made it very clear that he would not tolerate Steve not doing everything he had to get out of any fight alive. He remembered Bucky’s eyes blazing in rage any time he’d wanted to fight fair.

Steve had never tried to pretend to be a saint, but time after time when his Irish temper had got the better of him, it had been brushed off as a single instance. He had always hated that since they were just kids, everyone had always assumed that it was Bucky who was trouble, had grown to treat him badly for ending and winning the fights Steve had started, had made him out as some thug that would beat other boys to the death when he flew into a rage. He hated that Bucky, who would take care of any stray he came across, watched out for orphans, who broke up any fights he came across involving the younger kids, fiercely defended his three younger sisters like a mother bear, was treated as a wild punk. He hated that no one saw the boy that would sit at his bedside when he was asleep, staying awake all night on watch in case the Morrigan came, had stayed beside him even after his mother had called for last rites three different times, who would tenderly tuck his sisters into bed when his father was passed out drunk and his mother continued to work long into the night.

He remembered laughing bitterly when the Army had later started this mythos that made him a well of a calm that fought only when it was needed. He remembered how Bucky had sputtered wordless when he’d seen the Captain America comic that made him out be a _sidekick_ , a child that idolized the Captain and dressed in bright blue and red tights with a black domino mask.

He half-morbidly wondered what the mythos had evolved as for them without them there.

Spitting out a bit of blood, half cut off the ragged cough that had wanted to come, before fixing his own broken nose then tilting his head back, he knew the general had seen the flash of anger in his eyes. After his nose healed just a little more crooked than before, no one spoke of that fight again.

He remembered that Phillips no longer focused solely on wanting a soldier in his rhetoric to Dr. Erskine, but asked for someone who wasn’t constantly on the verge of dying.

He remembered that mere days before he would get the serum, that he saw the Morrigan for the third time in a moon.

He remembered that ever since that fight with Johnson, his lungs had been worse. He remembered that he spent half the night awake trying to stifle his bloody coughs. He remembered fighting to breathe even when doing nothing. He had known that his body had finally given up the ghost just when he’d been on the verge of getting the serum that would heal his broken body.

He remembered having to fight to not cough and collapse into a ball as they were all completing push-ups, his just barely being done as he sweated heavily and panted from the effort, arms shaking and an ominous rattling in his lungs, when Phillips had thrown what had appeared to be a live grenade at them.

He remembered acting without thinking, diving for it and curling around the thing with his eyes wide open to watch for Death as he waited for the scream of the _bean sidhe_ to fill his ears in his final moments, waited to see the Morrigan fly down and pluck his soul from him.

He remembered promising that he would not make his death easy for the Morrigan; he would demand that she take his soul to Bucky, and that she leave him there with him until she came to collect Bucky at a much later date, because he would not leave Bucky alone.

Only, the grenade hadn’t exploded after a long twenty seconds.

Then his hears had filled with Bucky loudly cursing him out in Romanian, copying all the terrible insults his grandfather had called Bram Stroker and the Irish in general except this time it would include him and still exclude his mother, before he switched to cursing him out in Russian.

He remembered thinking that if he could imagine the Romanian – which came out when he scared the holy living shit out of Bucky – followed by Russian – which came out when Bucky wanted desperately to kill somebody, and that he was fair game there – that he’d screwed up big time.

He remembered his next thought being: _Please God, no one tell Bucky that I jumped on what I thought was a live grenade_.

Now, he hoped that whoever had Bucky told him now, because an angry Bucky was a Bucky that wasn’t going to let anyone or anything stop him from releasing that anger on its rightful target, him, even if that someone was a god. Steve wanted to hope that Bucky showed up in any form just to yell at him. Even if it was just to give a lecture about his apparent lack of self-preservation.

He remembered thinking that he could see a very familiar look start to form on the face of the brunette woman who’d been watching this unit train for the last several weeks, as her own _oh-my-God-Steve-no!_ face.

He remembered the smug pride he’d felt at seeing that very familiar look, even if it had not been on the face he’d wanted it on. No one appreciated how much work it took to get that look from Bucky, not after literal decades by then of suffering his behavior, or even the, considerably less, effort it still took to get it from anyone else.

He remembered feeling (and trying to not look) very smug when after he’d been particularly reckless for the one (and only) mission the Army had tried to put Bucky back on sniping missions alone, _without him_ , he’d managed to get that look, in unison, from every member of the Howling Commandos and Peggy, when he’d debriefed about what he’d been doing on his separate mission, before Bucky had lectured him for two hours straight, across three languages with some very rude signs thrown in, about being _‘a damn stupid punk of a self-sacrificing little shit who clearly couldn’t look after his own damn six’_ , among other things.

He remembered how she took him from Camp Lehigh a few days later back to Brooklyn, and he’d awkwardly tried to compliment her. He had admired her from the first instance he’d seen her stand toe-to-toe with General Phillips and not back down, that she’d had her own high rank that she’d earned on her own merit. He’d tried to say that to her then, this first moment that they were away from anyone who’d either try to say he was kissing up to her, or who’d insult her strength of character, and further belittle how he was a head shorter and almost half her weight, but it hadn’t come out like he meant. She had smiled when he’d called her beautiful though.

That smile had become a series of concerned winces when he’d commented on the familiarity of practically every alley they had passed for having been beaten up in every single of them at one point or another. He didn’t get the chance to end that comment with the finishing touch that he’d given as good as he’d got and that it’d mostly stopped by the time he was fifteen, by her question of why he’d never run.

Now, he realized that the quirk of his lips then had been more sad than amused, “Once you start running, they’ll never let you stop. Not that I’d ever really needed to run, Bucky always had my back when I was in over my head.”.

Eventually, after they had both got to the European front, he’d told her of how his Ma had taught him to never run. After a particularly bad mission, he’d told her that there was no running when the _bean sidhe_ screamed for you, you’d only die tired, and with Death dodging his steps so much of his life, dying wasn’t something he’d ever been scared of.

He remembered thinking that after he’d tried to drink the entire liquor cabinet in his grief, that she’d finally understood why he’d always stood his ground, and had fought so hard; that it had always been to stand by Bucky _until the end of the line_. That he’d tried to drink his way into an early grave because when Bucky had needed him to fight for him as he’d done for him, that when he’d thought he’d heard the _bean sidhe_ scream for his friend, that the one fight that had ever mattered, he’d lost.

He still refused to consider the irony that the end had come on a train.

He remembered the rest of that drive being in awkward silence, before she’d led him into what appeared to be a regular storefront but the back of the shop betrayed that illusion when it led into a large underground bunker.

That had been when he’d been formally introduced to the sponsor of Project Rebirth, the Strategic Scientific Reserve (the SSR), an Allied deep science agency fighting against the Nazi-sponsored special weapons division HYDRA.

~

 _The_ Солдат _had informed them that in one of their missions, their target had said their name, had known nearly fifty years after the Body’s supposed death, that he’d been alive._

_That in the papers he’d collected from his trunk, some of which had described loosely what he’d found out about Captain America’s supersoldier serum, he described that if ‘ Barnes’ could survive being frozen on and off with his bastardized serum, that _ **Steve** _could survive his own nose-dive into the artic._

_In his rage that the_ stupid punk _had done something_ astoundingly _stupid without him there, he’d wrestled the Body away from the_ Солдат _and punched a hole into the nearest wall._

 _The_ Солдат _told him that he’d started searching for where the_ True _Handler could be._

 _The_ Солдат _told him of the promise that he and the_ True _Handler had made:_ **‘Til the End of the Line** _._

_They’d almost found out where he was when the Body was frozen again._

~

Steve wasn’t given much of a tour of the bunker, just dropped at his sleeping quarters next to Dr. Erskine’s while Peggy went to report to a superior officer.

He used that time to finally write a letter back to Bucky, hating this long separation. He’d drafted a letter or two while at basic, but he’d been sidelined whenever he’d noticed that he’d started to complain in them. The fact that Bucky had spent six weeks at basic before they’d had a couple of hours together again, made this the longest stint they’d been apart in all the years since they’d met, made this feel like they’d gone a lifetime without speaking.

He remembered how he’d hated that they’d left things unsaid.

He still hated that they had always left things unsaid, had carried things to their icy graves without once saying them aloud to the other.

He knew that he’d been just as guilty as Bucky about that.

He remembered that there were things that he would never dare write down in any form, but there were others that he’d should say, in case he died before the serum was administered.

After receiving several letters to _Stephanie_ , he’d gotten the hint that they couldn’t be sure that the other would be the only one to read what they wrote. It might be a federal offense to tamper with mail, but everyone had known that any mail sent to troops were checked for any secrets being leaked. It didn’t matter if those were only rumors or if they were true, they couldn’t risk it.

The fact was that it would look odd for Bucky to be getting letter after letter from his male friend unless it was to deliver news about his family. There was only so many things he could tell him as Steve.

 _Stephanie Rodgers_ , could write however many letters she liked.

_‘ Dear Bucky,_

_ I’m sorry I missed you at the Stark Expo before you shipped out. I came back to our home after searching the crowd for hours trying to find you, having gotten a glimpse of you in your uniform – you looked so dashing, I almost swooned – and found your necklace. _

_ It’s beautiful. I wear it now. I’ll always wear it. _

_ No one else understands what it means, what it means for us, but they know it’s precious to me. That it was from someone precious to me. _

_ I expect to be shipped out in another couple of weeks. I don’t know how long it will take for me to get transferred to the 107th, but I WILL get there. I don’t trust anyone else to bandage your wounds, to watch your back. _

_ Before I left, I had most of our things boxed up, and left them with your mother. She understood that I couldn’t stay there without you, and for all that I wanted to leave it as it was so we have a home to come back to, it didn’t feel right to pay for the apartment and not live there when there are still people living on the streets from the Crash. Becca promised to take care of the things we would want back when we came back, together. _

_ She’s leaving New York now that we’re both gone, going to work in the war factories in Philadelphia. Said that if we were going to do our part overseas, she would do her best to support us here at home. _

_ I’m probably to blame for her attitude in this, and for showing her that Rosie the Riveter poster. _

_ Ana is training to be a radio operator. She’s going to be the best switchboard operator, I just know it, particularly as she already is first in her class. I haven’t said anything to your mother, but I think she’s using her access to listen in on the resistance broadcasts from Russia. _

_ Evie is still fiddling with all those tech scraps she’d squirrelled away. I think she’s going to try to follow Becca’s footsteps to the war factories. I don’t doubt that she’ll go on to prove that women can be just as good at creating things than men. I think she’ll prove they can be even better. _

_ Your family sends their love. Your mother told me to tell you that you better make it home, that if she had to bury another son before her, that she would march up to Hitler and knock his lights out herself. Then stomp on his balls to make him squeal for mercy before you found a way to bring you back so she could drag you home by your ear. _

_ I don’t think she’s kidding either. Your mother is honestly the scariest person I have ever met. _

_ I want you to take care of yourself Bucky; I’m the one that does stupid shit, not you. Don’t go channeling me. Come back to me alive, or I’ll go find you, and bring you back to life so I can kill you myself for dying on me. I don’t doubt your mother would assist either. _

_ ‘Til the end of the line,_

_ Stephanie Rodgers’_

Much of his time there in the SSR was spent doing physical after physical test.

From morning to evening, test after test.

It was the needles that got to him, memories of too much time getting shots, having blood drawn, being hooked up to machines, swirling in his head. Dr. Erskine had explained to him that they needed a medical baseline for him before giving him the serum, but it didn’t make it any easier to stand, not when he had a _very_ well documented medical history.

He’d seen his own medical file; it had been easily as thick as _Bucky’s_ wrist.

It still didn’t make any sense to him for them to have to do more and more tests, when pretty much any test that they could run on him, had been run at one point or another.

He never found out that Dr. Erskine had found out he’d been dying, had taken that secret to the grave to give him a chance to live. That he’d carefully edited out that fact from the tests for him, knowing that if he’d been denied this chance to try, he would find another way to the front and would surely die there.

As they did test after test, he would almost hear Bucky hissing in his ear that they were screwing with him, doing all these tests, trying to get him to quit, and that he should give the next one to stick him with an unnecessary needle a knuckle sandwich.

Every test that was done, punching a doctor got a little more tempting.

That they had refused to tell him what they were testing for, were looking for, refused to show him the test results, pissed him off and made his hand start to curl into a fist more often than not. Too many more tests and he _would_ have punched a doctor.

During the war, when he and the boys had rattled off the things they’d feared, he’d listed needles, partly because of all these tests. Bucky had understood right away why, having been present for a great many of his innumerous hospital visits. Dum-Dum, who having just admitted that spiders unnerved him, had been confused, but Bucky had known that all the childhood tests, half of his life spent in a hospital, then receiving the serum, had done little to give him any reason to be at all fond of medical needles.

If he never had to endure another needle stuck in his skin to fix him, he would be a relatively happy man.

The night before getting the serum, when he and Dr. Erskine had shared his bottle of scotch, Steve was pretty sure he’d ranted about the awfulness of needles, among other things.

The Japanese Internment camps might have been one; there were vague memories of him ranting about lots of inequalities.

The night was kind-of fuzzy no matter how hard he tried to remember. That could be blamed on how he’d drunk the bottle with the good doctor.

He did remember telling the good doctor that he didn’t care what he had to do, what he had to endure, as long as he got to the European front. The risk of dying due to the serum had been acceptable in his eyes. Particularly with his life numbered in weeks now, and the war looking like it wouldn’t end any time soon. The doctor had been less than comfortable at his declaration, but they’d been drunk enough that neither of them would remember much of what they had said.

Even still, he hadn’t said aloud what he’d known since he was eight.

It was a secret that he would take to his grave if saying something would have meant making Bucky’s life a living hell, would mean besmirching his name.

In the years after, he did wonder what Dr. Erskine would have thought about his loving another man, if he would have supported them.

It would be a long time, not until he’d gone under the ice, that he would remember more of that night, and that part of the reason Erskine had fled Germany, why he’d been so ready to flee even before the supersoldier serum had ever gotten involved, had been because he’d had a little brother. A brother who had been a bit queer, and fallen in love with his best friend, but had gotten caught not long after Hitler had come to power. Both boys had fought the SS during their arrest, and had been gunned down in the street from their neighboring homes for it.

When he remembered, the story made him cry all over again, warm salty tears joining the liquid ice around him, at the cruel fate given to the two. At the fate that would have awaited Bucky and him if they’d ever said anything during the War.

That night he’d started another letter to Bucky, one that he’d immediately burned upon completion, as even when completely drunk, he’d been unable to let the words leave him; _‘Bucky, I love you. Always have. Always will. ’_.

Those words, and his drive to protect Bucky, had been why he’d pushed through his unease with all the needles in the metal capsule they had stuck him in to inject him with Dr. Erskine’s serum, to bombard him with Vita-Rays, why he’d pushed on despite the immense pain he’d felt after the multiple injections.

 _That_ had felt like someone had poured hot steel right into his veins, to spread throughout his body with every heartbeat, and made him scream, howl, with the pain. That he’d been able to _feel_ his lungs, his heart, strengthen, hardened his conviction to continue on and demand to do so even as someone tried to put an end to the experiment.

Feeling his spine straighten out, and his muscles grow so that every action wasn’t a trial, wasn’t a gamble with an asthma attack, or a heart attack, was a wonderful kind of pain. It hurt like he’d been thrown down the nine levels of Dante’s hell and was clawing his way back up, but it also felt like there was a whisper in his ear saying that if he survived this, he would be strong enough to protect Bucky from anything.

He remembered feeling like that suffering anything, any pain, any loss, would be worth it, as long as he could have Bucky by his side. He still felt that way, would do damn near anything, if it meant he got Bucky back. It didn’t matter to him, which went where, as long as they were together.

 _I’m with you till the end of the line_ , was the promise, and the end of the line didn’t exist as long as one of them still existed in any matter of shape.

When they had opened the capsule, and he’d realized that the strong body he’d been promised was two heads taller, twice as broad, and built like Adonis, he’d been quick to stifle the mix of emotions he’d felt before anyone could see.

All he’d wanted was not be on the verge of dying every other breath, for every season to not try and kill him, for his body not trying to kick the bucket what felt like every other _minute_. Being over twice his previous size was not what he’d wanted.

How could he ever say that this new body, which from that first moment it had been revealed, everyone had wanted, was not something he wanted. That he would have been fine with just having a clean bill of health.

He buried the anxiety he felt at suddenly being unable to escape anyone’s attention; the fear that Bucky would hate his new appearance; the sorrow that he could never fit under Bucky’s chin again, would never be able to pass as ‘Stephanie’ Rodgers again.

He didn’t know how much he would come to hate the serum in that moment, but he had felt the first flush of hate then. Hate for what it had turned him into.

Decades later, that hate still festered and burned hot, over not just his personal issues with the serum but over all the attempts to copy it and the poor souls subjected to those attempts that came to his attention. For all the good that people would tell him that he did with the serum, he would never be able to reconcile it as being worth it.

He could never blame Dr. Erskine though for creating it. Or wish that it had never been administrated to him, that Dr. Erskine hadn’t given it to him. It would have been the easy way out, would have left hundreds if not thousands left in the clutches of Hydra, would have left Bucky in their hands.

No, he hated the serum and what it had done to him, but he didn’t regret getting the serum.

Looking at the world with clear eyes for the first time in his memory, the world not slightly blurry, not slightly fuzzy, able to differentiate between blues-greens-browns, able to see everything in a vivid technicolor, he took in as much as he could of what was around him. Of the dim lab and horde of people that started to crowd him upon seeing his transformation

The scent of antiseptic and sweat and dust was heavy in his nose, as if it had been rubbed in it. He could hear the appreciative and excited murmurs in every part of the room, even the area in the back above them behind glass, really hearing things for the first time in a long time from the left beyond soft static. His wool-polyester pants were tight against his sensitive skin, and were just a bit itchy.

He remembered hearing a gun cock just before Dr. Erskine was shot, but his body had been new and his limbs hadn’t wanted to cooperate to how he’d wanted to try and stop the shot.

He never told anyone of the guilt that had settled heavy on his newly-broad shoulders at seeing the kind man laid out on the floor, bleeding out, dying, because he’d been too slow.

The fact that the man had _smiled_ , and had looked at peace despite the staggering amounts of pain he must have been in with a close-range shot to the chest, didn’t make it any less. That some of his last words had been a thank you for staying with him in the end, for having letting him get to know him, their hands clasped together as his heartbeat slowed and stuttered before fading, just made it worse.

Among his last thoughts on the _Valkyrie_ as she went down, was that he had realized that while Dr. Erskine might have never sought death out, could have gone on living for decades more, a part of him had died some time ago; his heart had died and he’d simply been waiting for his body to catch on. As he’d made his choice to take the plane down into the water, he could understand the look he’d seen not just several times in Dr. Erskine’s eyes, but in his own mother’s eyes at times.

The rage Bucky had _often_ commented on, that he had learned to defuse or redirect with silly comments or stupid puns, just as he’d learned little tricks to defuse Bucky’s rage, had bubbled up at seeing Dr. Erskine die for no good reason. No reason at all.

Without a second thought, once the life had left Dr. Erskine, he’d chased after the man who had shot the man.

Hearing the unearthly baying of a hound in his ears, he was almost able to see from the corner of his eye, a great black dog-wolf nearly as big as he was jumping from shadow to shadow with his crimson eyes fixed on Dr. Erskine’s killer. His mother’s stories of the Old World rang in his ears; of how the _bean sidhe_ screamed upon the hour of death, of how the Morrigan watched in the days leading up. Reminding him of the hound that hunted the damned and devoured their soul, the child of Fenrir: The Grim.

His rage settled some, still angry, but more vindictively pleased for even if the man somehow escaped him, escaped mortal justice, that the Grim _would_ catch him. The Grim would deliver justice for a senseless murder.

He shook off the colt-like stumbling to match the long loping run of the Grim, a dark look in his eyes as he hunted down evil alongside the Great Dog.

He chased after the man with a single-minded purpose, not noticing immediately the ease of how he ran, of how he could breathe, at how strong and calm his heart remained beating; just continued chasing.

When the man turned back around some, gun aimed not at him, but a pair of children on the street, he was moving before he thought. Pulling a car door off its hinges and holding it in front of them like a shield for the bullets to bounce off, to embed in the steel, and clatter to the ground.

Then he was off again while the scent of fear slowly receded and no iron tang came to the air.

For a moment, he almost had the man, grasping the back of the car the man had high-jacked and holding it there in place even as the wheels squealed against the ground and the scent of rubber burned in the air. There was a moment of fear that flickered across the man’s face as he saw for himself the Grim in its entirety as it lunged for him, before the bumper broke free of the car and the car shot forward with all the speed it’d built up to at once.

They gave chase, following him to the river, where the man quickly fled the car for a submarine that was waiting for him.

The Grim lunged for the submarine, jaws clamping down on the metal and crushing it as their nails scratched at and cut deep grooves into the side. He landed on the nose of the sub, and punched at the glass, using how the thing was listing to the side under the weight of the Grim to not be knocked off by the current.

His grin was dark as the glass gave beneath his knuckles, before he reached through the jagged pieces to pull him out, and dragged him up to the street with the Grim pacing behind him.

The man grinned bloody, eyes wide and fearful at the sight of the large black wolf-dog behind him, before saying, “Cut off one head, and two more take its place,”, then bit into something in his mouth. He could only watch as foam spewed from his mouth as his body convulsed, but the Grim lunged forward with a snarl, jaws clamping onto his chest.

He would never forget the blood-curdling scream that ripped out of the man’s throat as the Grim tore out his soul and devoured it while he still lived.

~

_This time as the Body was frozen, something about one memory stuck out to him._

_It was still fairly fuzzy on the details, but he remembered having been captured, having been tortured. Then big Steve showing up and taking him away. That memory was quite a bit clearer than some of the earlier ones, for a reason he didn’t know, but it was still missing pieces at the moment._

_When big Steve, blurry no matter how much he focused, came up on him, something about how he was dressed, how he was armed stuck out in a way that hadn’t registered before._

_His uniform was thinner, not regulation. The helmet that sat loosely on his head wasn’t standard regulation, looked flimsy in such a way little Steve could have punched it and broke it. There was a wooden shield, compromised by a large crack, on his back. The gun at his waist was German-make._

_The_ Солдат _was the one to say it; the_ True _Handler was reckless without them to keep them safe. That while there was smugness at how the_ True _Handler would rescue them if need be, at the drop of a hat if needed, there was also something close to concern at how they had done so._

 _The_ Солдат _seemed to reach a conclusion, “_ Мы являемся его обработчик, как он наш. Мы являемся его истинный обработчик и меч его щит.” _._


	6. An End Comes to All Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The past catches up to the present.

_The ice around him was shifting more than usual._

_He could almost hear something cutting through the water above him, knocking things loose from the ocean floor as the ice churned._

_He’d been waking on and off more so recently than usual, as the_ Valkyrie _started to drift closer to the surface this summer._

_He wasn’t aware enough to fight his way past the lethargy in his limbs, but his mind was much more awake and aware than it had since his Fall. Rage boiled under his skin, and it had been forcing an uncooperative limb to move even slightly, pushing himself closer to where he could see a glint of round metal._

_He could almost hear the familiar baying of the Great Dog calling him out for the Hunt to begin. The Howl promised him vengeance and justice and retribution, stopping him from sinking back beneath the memories as deeply._

_He knew that it would be soon that he would wake up for good._

With Dr. Erskine dead, Steve became the only recipient of his supersoldier serum, the only success of Project Rebirth.

After Peggy had gently pulled him back from where she could almost hear the Grim devouring the soul of the man who’d killed the good doctor, he’d seen the way he’d been looked at. Even before they had said anything about dressing up and going on a stateside tour to serve his company as living propaganda, he had known that there was no way that they would let him go to the front and risk their investment.

General Phillips, seeing a familiar look on his face, remembering what he’d seen during training, had pulled him aside after the Senator had left, and told him to be patient. That he would get over to the front soon enough and wish he’d never left the country after he saw what war really looked like.

Phillips never told that there had been something dark brewing in his eyes, something that told him, one way or another, Steve would get to the front lines, and that God take mercy on the soul who stood between him and there. It was a secret he would take to his grave, would only later say that for all his doubts and misgivings about Steve Rodgers in the beginning, that he had soon discarded those doubts and saw a man that he would want at his side in the hell of war.

He never told anyone that by the end of the war, he had prayed that Barnes was actually dead and not just missing, that Rodgers had thrown himself into an icy grave to never come back up, and that neither would ever show up to find the other was in the hands of somebody else. He feared such an event, after seeing how both would ignore orders, go above and beyond what other people would do to save their wives or mothers, a quiet rage in their eyes that made people quake in their boots as they tore through whatever stood in their way to the other. He also had no thoughts of mercy if someone _had_ done such a thing – he had no doubts that they would both burn the world down to rescue the other. That if somebody got their hands on one, they deserved such a fate for trying to keep one apart from the other, keep one soul from its other half.

Steve remembered General Phillips taking him aside for a moment to tell him to be patient, an understanding in his eyes that had quieted the rage that brewed beneath his skin enough for him to start to plan. He would give the military six months before he abandoned his duties and made his way to the front lines. He would not wait a day longer, and he remembered thinking that only God would take mercy on those who tried to control him if he found out that Bucky had died before then, because he wouldn’t.

There would never be mercy for anyone who kept him from Bucky.

The Senator didn’t see this, and assigned him to a song and dance tour to sell war bonds. They outfitted him in glorified tights in red-white-blue, with a wooden shield and half-a-hood with little white wings at his temples, called him _Captain America_. They had him sing and dance with showgirls who’d left Broadway to work for next to nothing in want of doing something more, told him to lift motorcycles with three girls on it, to stage-punch Hitler. They made little movies of these shows, shipped them overseas to the troops as motivation.

He thought they were a joke, even before he went overseas himself, did them because Senator Pierce kept telling him, ‘just one more time’, that ‘finish these five cities and I’ll send you overseas, my boy’. Each time the temptation to kick the man in the junk and see if he could squeal higher than a soprano while he said that line _again_ , just got bigger. A couple of times the girls had to gently pull him away before he decked somebody that said he was serving his country well like this, as a symbol of the nation.

One of the girls, May, spent her spare time drawing, sketching their little shows, and the other girls in their off time. Before they had left Boston, she had found him a sketchbook of his own after she’d seen him doodle on napkins and scraps of flyers. More than once, they had spent the hours between destinations just sketching anything and everything they saw.

He remembered that Peggy had somehow before the image _Captain America_ got too big, got into his contract with the army, not only his one stipulation that a stop in Philadelphia be made, but got him rights to his own image. He was able to control what images of him were on posters; they had to show him beforehand and he had to approve.

He remembered she had done so because he’d come across a poster that marginalized women and he’d spent an hour ranting to Peggy during her next visit about the injustice.

Most of the posters that went out after Richmond were originally drawn by himself, or by May.

He remembered how the girls had cheered and basically piled on him when Peggy had succeeded in his request of splitting his wage for the shows so that the girls made a little more, and that they all got about the same amount.

He remembered that between him and Ely, that they managed to create and manage their own little union for them after that, her head for numbers and skill at managing them keeping them afloat. That the man who officially managed them spent more money keeping them pretty, then he did keeping them fed and warm, not managing their show costs well so they ran out of necessities on the road. All the money they scrounged up in war bonds, and not more than a few percent went to them, went to keeping them going. Luckily Ely was a god-sent angel with money, and they didn’t starve.

She was also a bloody mind-reader with how she always knew he was hiding something; like how with this new body, came a greatly increased metabolism and that to be full, he had to eat as much as four of them, and she worked to keep him at least half-full as best she could.

He remembered how she’d once alluded to him having _family_ back in Chicago, and that he was welcome to help her keep her father if not on the right side of the law, then at least teach them some of his secrets. Her eyes had damn-near twinkled as she’d told him he was a little shit who raised hell, after he’d sweetly told Pierce to more-or-less fuck himself in not so many words.

Grace, like Evie Barnes, had a head for machines and science in general. Steve remembered thinking that she and Evie would get on like a house and fire, and Bucky would puff out in pride at seeing that his little sister wasn’t alone in having a brain, in how if the world was a little more kind, they would go _far._

Steve remembered giving Grace, Evie’s information, so that she could reach out to the younger girl, give them both someone to talk to that understand more than the four or five words Bucky understood. When Steve sent his next letter to Bucky, he told him all about Grace and how she was just like Evie, and the next couple of letters from Bucky had a page for Grace, talking all about the science Bucky thought that could become reality in his secreted away science-fiction collection.

He remembered how it filled his heart with happiness at seeing Bucky’s enthusiasm when both of their letters were sparse with details about what was going on around them. He knew Bucky was not telling him about fighting, about being in the trenches, about men dying around him, instead telling him funny little moments with his unit.

Telling him about how he’d found a college-educated, trilingual radioman in a segregated unit, and had managed to snatch him up before anyone had realized he was pulling a black man to the 107th. Telling him about this big, burly strongman-like man who’d called Gabe Jones a nigger, and had punched the man in the dick to pass along the message that they had an enemy, they didn’t need to be fighting themselves. Telling him about their unit medic, being a second-generation Japanese immigrant, and how he reminded him of Sarah, with his brisk, no nonsense attitude and sometimes just plain awful bedside manner with his off-color jokes, and his gentle hands.

Steve didn’t need the words to hear that Bucky had found himself men he would trust, that he would call brother.

With how many papers the Senator had him sign upon admission to Project Rebirth, Steve couldn’t tell him a lot of details about what he was doing either, so he had let Bucky’s lack of details slide. Still, ‘Stephanie’ could tell him about traveling with _Captain America_.

He had cheekily sent a pack of smokes with a blood-red lipstick stain on each of the smokes, with a note of ‘this is how your money is being spent, you Jerk’, when he had received notice that Bucky’s army pay was going to him.

He remembered Danny, with her perchance of dressing up in a powder-blue suit not unlike one Bucky had owned to go out on the town with another of the girls, Kimmy, had caught him applying that lipstick and smiled. She had helped him find a few things to wear as Steph in the privacy of his hotel room, just as he had helped her find bold pieces of men’s clothing.

He remembered how she’d covered for him when he’d made them all these knitted scarves in the shade of their eyes.

He remembered Kimmy baking at every opportunity presented to them, using whatever was on hand to create absolutely delicious things out of what looked like nothing. He remembered her filling an entire notebook of some of the recipes she tried on the road with them, of the ones they adored and they hated.

He remembered that just as Danny slipped Steph a tube or two of lipstick, of a pair of nylons, Kimmy had given her copies of her recipes, scribbled onto the back of some of the doodles he did of them in his sketchbook. He remembered how she’d asked him if the man who held his heart treated him right, her eyes dark as she hugged Danny close to her with the memories of a past partner subduing Danny. He remembered how bright he’d blushed as he’d described Bucky, telling her some of the secrets he had never talked about with the man himself. He remembered her soft smile at him.

He remembered how Cathy, a little older than the rest of the girls, kept them in line in public, her eyes sharp and always catching whenever when even the smallest piece of their ensembles was out of line. He remembered how she had laughed so loudly in private while they had mended their clothes, stitching in little swirls and bolts into each tear, embroidering stars into patches when Ely couldn’t get them the money for newer clothes. He remembered how when they were all out of the public eye, her Chicago accent came out full force as she cracked off-color jokes. He remembered her mind being as sharp as a whip, able to pick through their contracts and find the loopholes, as well as the awful clauses that meant he had to find a woman to play faithful little homebody to him.

He remembered that she would often come to his aid when women swarmed, played at his girl for the public. He remembered later telling Peggy about her, and had seen the two meet once when the tour intersected with the base, and the two getting on like two long-lost sisters.

He remembered how sweet little Janet spent her spare moments writing, anything and everything. He remembered one time her eyes being wide and almost tearful as she’d asked him to read over her latest story, after Cindy had told her it was awful. His eyes had gone wide and he’d gaped at her when he’d found it almost entirely smut, acting all scandalized before grinning wide and telling her of his own eight-pagers he’d made in the last few years previous, told her of his long tenure at Miss Clare’s.

Even when he was on the front lines, she somehow managed to always send him her newest manuscripts, and Bucky and him would critique them for her.

She never told him how she had dedicated many of them when she published them to her good friends, Jamie and Stephanie, and put aside some of the profits of each to be donated to the Queer community throughout the seventies and eighties under those names; Jamie Rogers and Stephanie Barnes.

He remembered having each of the girls sign one of his drawings of them with all their relevant information so that he could find them again after the War by the fifth month of their tour, because he was nearly about to find himself a plane and get overseas by himself.

The letters from Bucky kept him grounded as the months had gone by.

The letters from Becca and how she told him of how she’d proved her mettle in the workforce in her part of Philadelphia and they’d come to respect her, made him proud. The letters from Ana, telling him of how she’d been recruited from Military Communications to Military Intelligence, made him proud. That her liaison with MI6, Edwin Jarvis, was charming and quite the gentleman to her, treating her like his equal and like a high-born lady, made him smile. The occasional letters from Evie, with her thousands of _thank-you_ s for introducing her to Grace, _her science sister_ , and ramblings of whatever machinery she was currently working on for the war effort, made him laugh as her letters were always a little disjointed, jumping from subject to subject, and looking like half-made shopping lists in the middle.

The letter he got from Virginia made him smile at hearing that she’d met Evie, and was completely exasperated at how maniac and scatter-brained the younger girl could be when working.

Steve would find that he was not at all surprised when he found out that Virginia’s granddaughter became the handler for a maniac, scatter-brained, genius inventor mechanic, just like her grandmother.

Even being at war, Bucky had made sure to time his letters to one every week, or at worst, one every two weeks. When a third week passed without a letter, Steve remembered marching right up to Pierce and _demanding_ to go overseas.

If Pierce had delayed even slightly, he would have gone rogue and made his own way onto the next transport of soldiers headed to Italy that was leaving that evening.

He remembered the man going pale at the dark look in his eye, the promise of violence and death to anyone who stood between him and Bucky, before stuttering that he would be in Italy by first light.

He remembered how tight his skin had felt, at how something was coiled beneath it, aching to burst free.

He didn’t know how a sliver of gold had come to circle his iris, revealing a glimpse of something inhuman. If he had known, had seen, then he would have smiled, not a kind smile, but one full of teeth and dark promises, as he had glimpsed gold in Bucky’s eyes a few times over the years when someone had gone too far and was proud that he could be like Bucky in this way.

Pierce had wanted him to do a sing-and-dance routine with the girls when they had arrived. He hadn’t.

He remembered Danny gripping his shoulder with a wide grin, and telling him to go and get his man, before Cathy had pulled out an older costume of his, and had finished modifying to fit the tall, broad girl. He remembered tearing up a little at leaving these wonderful ladies, before Ely had grinned just as wide as Danny and shoved him out of the tent.

He remembered looking at many of the posters for the showgirls that got sent his way thanks to May, to see that Danny had stepped flawlessly into his spot on the tour, and other than the fact it was open knowledge that he was out fighting the good fight, no one seemed to know anything was different on the tour, that no one knew that Danny wasn’t a born man. He remembered smiling at how he saw Kimmy curled into ‘Captain America’s’ side. He remembered that Cathy had gotten the girls all to sign one of May’s posters with Danny as the Captain, and had grinned big with a twinkle in her eye as she told him that when they were found out, they could all have a big hoot as they drank some of Kimmy’s secreted whiskey at having fooled the world. He remembered that particular poster being sent to Becca for safe-keeping.

With Danny having taken over that show, he had gone straight to the highest commanding officer, mildly surprised to see General Phillips again, before asking after Bucky.

He remembered the devastation he’d felt when the man had told him he’d written a consolation letter for him, as well as for many of the 107th, because nearly all the unit had been captured, held miles behind enemy lines at Azanno, with little hope any were alive this long after, particularly after having seen that which remained of those that were confirmed dead. He remembered grabbing that wooden shield and one of the girl’s helmets, thinking them inadequate to fight with, but that they were better than nothing, telling Peggy that he didn’t care about the odds, that he didn’t care if he was disobeying orders leaving camp.

He remembered thinking as Peggy had told him that she would get him a ride, orders be damned, that she had looked beautiful. He remembered thinking that she was exactly the dame his mother would have approved of, never mind how she was English, and that the two would have gotten along _marvelously_.

He smiled at her as he followed her out, telling her quietly that he didn’t think he would ever be able to repay her for being such a good friend, for doing him such a favor. He remembered how she side-eyed him, her lips thinned unhappily, then told him that he could repay her by coming back alive.

He remembered thinking that she would get along _splendidly_ with Bucky, if he was reading her face right as exasperated- _why-Steve_ -fond- _dammit-Steve_ -annoyed- _you-little-shit-better-come-back-alive_ , because that face was _very_ much like the face Bucky was going to make hearing he would be running a one-man rescue mission behind enemy lines. The only difference was that there was also going to some heavy-duty anger, deep-seated concern, and a little flailing that was Bucky wanting to alternately kill him himself and/or tie them together so he couldn’t go more than five feet away without him.

Howard Stark had not really been on board with this whole ‘fly behind enemy lines’, but he’d been convinced.

The switchblade he had played with for the entire flight probably hadn’t helped Stark’s nerves, but Steve had been a little too busy fluctuating between _what-if-Bucky-is-alive-is-hurt-he-needs-me_ and _if-Bucky-is-dead-I’m-killing-them-all_. Steve thought that Stark was rather lucky that he hadn’t been standing directly behind him, holding that knife as he flicked it open and closed over and over, and not more than the half-convinced he’d been, that Bucky was already dead; he’d been a bit of a live wire, and if Stark had dared to make a comment that was anything other than reassurances, or when they had become the target of anti-plane weapons, he might have ended up with that knife drawing his blood.

Stark was certainly sweating a few bullets as he’d tried to grin cocksure at Peggy while trying to evade getting hit, then had said, “Well, Captain, I’m not going to be able to make a landing. Any other genius plans _other than marching straight up to the front door_ before I turn around?”.

Steve had smirked as he’d pulled a parachute onto his back, making sure to look extra innocent as he opened the back door of the plane, “The same plan. See you on the other side,”, before he stepped backwards with a wave. They’d both stared at him before their eyes had gotten big, Peggy left to watch his descent as Stark tried to turn the plane around.

He counted to ten with every other beat of his speeding heart before he pulled the cord, a too-wide grin splitting across his face when he could hear a familiar heart-stopping howl as a dark shadow far below him on the ground guided him to which way to go.

He remembered thinking this would only go one of two ways; either he would find Bucky, and the rest of the 107th, and make like a blunt instrument and bludgeon their way free, or he would still find Bucky, dead, he would free what remained of the 107th, then he would go tearing through this enemy base with the Grim until every one of these fucking bastards was dead, and their souls were eaten.

He was still high above the ground when his parachute was shot, but it was a distance that he was certain was feasible to fall. A mere three stories wouldn’t kill him now he was sure, but if the ‘chute caught on anything above the ground, and he got tangled in it, he could get stuck there until an enemy found it, or the jerk of force could break his neck. In a manner of moments, he had gotten himself free of the harness and hit the remaining thirty feet in a roll.

He heard part of his shield crack against the ground, but he didn’t check it; the thing was solid wood, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good against bullets no matter the condition.

He remembered being outside the base in a sparsely forested area when he got to his feet.

Bucky liked to call him a bull in a china shop, always charging in through the front door recklessly, and he did intend to charge right in through the proverbial front door, but he would use some stealth. If Bucky was alive, he didn’t need to be found out before he’d at least gotten to Bucky.

He remembered thinking that if Bucky had been the one mounting a one-man rescue mission, that the other man would have been a ghost, slipping in unnoticed and freeing the 107th, before he found a way to make the base go _boom_. While probably laughing maniacally and calling these fuckers every bad name in the book in five different languages, picking off the survivors one by one from a distance almost leisurely as he smoked his last cigarette.

Bucky always had been a vengeful sonovabitch. Not that he wasn’t himself, but Bucky did it in a more _spectacular_ way that made it clear that if you wanted to continue living without forever looking over your shoulder, you didn’t cross him.

Sneaky had never come easily to him, not like it had for Bucky, but his small body had always lent him a degree of stealth that made most things he did, in a manner, stealthy. Now it was the opposite, only he’d learned a few tricks from Bucky in all the years of watching him.

Bucky was a goddamn _cat_ ; showing up anywhere and everywhere at anytime with no warning, perching in high places. Bucky’s letter telling him he’d become a sniper had not been a surprise _at all_ ; it had basically been the accumulation of a lifetime of habits, showcased and recognized now by Bucky’s new sharpshooting skills. That Bucky was also a stealthy bastard just meant the man could get to premier sniping perches while surrounded by the enemy without anyone the wiser until bodies started to fall.

Hence despite being a hulking mass of muscle, he managed to slip past and incapacitate any guards between him and the main building without being noticed, thanks to a lifetime of watching Bucky.

If these were just soldiers, fighting for what they believed were right, or made to fight, Steve thought he would have been swamped in guilt, if not in the moment then later. Even as he cut throats and broke necks, there had been a little guilt about maybe these soldiers, if in a different setting, they could have been friendly. Only, he didn’t particularly have the fortitude or mercy at the moment to decide to just knock any guards he came across out and risk them revealing his presence before he got the 107th out of here. He did close their eyes before stashing them out of sight, saying a soft prayer that their soul left this world at peace and that it go where it belonged, be it heaven or hell.

Steve remembered Bucky’s voice in his ear telling him to strip them of any and all weapons, of anything that could even remotely be of use in their escape.

The side-arms he’d grabbed were less for him and more for Bucky, but he’d heard Bucky in his ear cussing him out for not just _going in_ basically unarmed, but _remaining so_ , and had pocketed one of them for himself, if for no other reason than that he wasn’t giving Bucky further ammo in the coming lecture.

He’d had no intention of _ever_ telling Bucky he’d gone in with an essentially useless wooden shield, a stage helmet, and a pocket switchblade, and no other plan than to search every square inch of that base until he found Bucky, dead or alive.

He _still_ shuddered at what he was sure would be Bucky’s response if he ever realized.

He remembered thinking that he was glad that he gave the illusion of being armed before the plane left to Peggy, because he still feared that she would rat him out in a heartbeat to Bucky, in this life or in the afterlife.

~

_He remembered a lifetime with Steve, and that for him, it would have never been enough._

_He remembered a lifetime of regrets, of never saying something that he’d known nearly from day one._

_The_ Солдат _promised him that once they were woken once more, they would play along only as long as it took to be armed and outfitted, then they would be in the wind._

 _They_ would _find Steve._

~

Steve remembered very clearly coming across the rows upon rows were soldiers were being held in the bowels of this base.

He couldn’t read the German that sat labelled each cell, but he recognized the caricature of a lion roaring with a sword and shield in hand that most of them had left on the scraps of their uniforms as being the 107th. He remembered how Bucky had told him the 107th’s motto, _“The brave tread never alone into a hell no one else dares to,”_ , and how he’d sent his own little doodle of a lion wielding this very sword and shield.

Bucky had never told him that among the 107th that he led, they had taken up this specific caricature he had made for Bucky.

He remembered unlocking the first few cells himself, before handing someone the keys he’d swiped and letting them use them.

He remembered looking among all these unfamiliar faces for Bucky, barely aware of how he told them that he was there to free them, that he had snuck in unnoticed but he wasn’t sure how much longer they had before they were. He remembered passing out most of the weapons he’d accumulated, except for two, and thinking that that their bloody sharp smiles at being once more armed reminded him of Bucky.

He remembered asking some if a Sergeant Barnes was amongst them, but most hadn’t seen or heard from him since before the battle that had landed them here.

He remembered how with each negative answer, he focused that anger that boiled under his skin into crushing the lock on the doors of cells with his bare hands to free as many of these men as he could, not bothering to wait for the keys to come around.

He remembered getting to a man that he recognized, a big, burly man that _had_ been a strongman, and after smiling almost fragile-like at seeing him here at war, seeing him alive, and realizing Bucky had been telling him about him unknowing that they’d known each other. Dum-Dum had been the one to tell him that Bucky had been taken away a few hours ago, and they’d been hearing his screams until recently.

Dum-Dum had been the one to take charge of this cell, one that he later realized had been the unit Bucky had been describing in his letters, and give him leave to find Bucky and bring him back, letting him leave the fate of the 107th to him for the moment.

He remembered having mixed feelings on leaving them, but that anxious feeling that had twisting in his guts since hearing Bucky was a POW was over-ruling his sense of duty. A sense of duty that had been temporarily relieved of him with the **order** to _find-that-damn-man-and-bring-him-back-to-us_.

Steve had always had a love-hate relationship with authority, needing to question it just as much as he idolized it, but here, there were no questions.

He was unaware of how as he left the 107th, that he was less walking away, as he was _stalking at a lope_. That the further away he got out of their sight, for the few who had watched him go instead of scourging around for weapons, that his shadow seemed to grow and shift to something more than human, to something resembling the Great Dog that had come to his side.

As he jogged down halls, something in him telling him to go this way or that, his teeth were bared in a sharp parody of a smile as he sorted through the tens of scents coming at him, trying to identify the one he knew as _Bucky_. He remembered no fear of being found, with the Great Dog at his side, jogging with him, darting forward whenever somebody was near.

He remembered no pity or guilt at how the Great Dog tore out throats and clawed into chests, tearing out damned souls while they were alive. He remembered believing that if the Great Dog had reason to going after them, then they had become monsters in human form.

He knows that he is no paragon of virtue, no saint, not perfect in any manner, but he believed in that intentions meant the world in thoughts and actions, believed that doing bad needed consequences equal to the havoc caused.

He remembered thinking that whatever evil these monsters had done, it must have been heinous, horrible, and awful.

If he ever crossed a line where he was no longer doing good no matter his intentions, he would lay down his arms and embrace the Great Dog and let them tear out his soul and devour it for an eternity of torment. He swore this, and thought that perhaps that was why he seemed a favored companion of the Great Dog.

He remembered the moment where he distantly heard Bucky’s voice, “James Barnes, Sergeant, 32557038,”, repeating those three things over and over in a scratchy, soft, deadpan voice.

He remembered how his heart had broken at hearing him all but given up.

He didn’t blame Bucky for thinking that there would be no rescue for him. There wouldn’t have been, or at least not in time, if he hadn’t gone rogue.

It had been right _then_ , that the whispers of how all that pain for the serum would become worth it came true, _were worth it all_ , because littler him would have done his damn best, but he doubted it would have been _enough_ to get _there_ , and big him had.

It had been a pretty even mix of despair and dismay, and over-bounding joy and happiness, at seeing Bucky; for seeing him in clear pain, with no clear way to help, see him so clearly out of it, shaking slightly and pale with fever-bright flushes of color in his cheeks and eyes just a bit glazed, _but to see him at all, **alive**_. He hated how bad he looked, but to see him _at all_ , to see him _alive_ , it had made his blood sing. Sing with rage at how he was hurt. Sing with joy to see him still alive.

Steve didn’t think there had ever been a moment for that had ever been as gratifying as that had been, to look at Bucky, to see a familiar red-eyed crow, and to bare his sharp teeth with gold-flecked eyes narrowed and _howl_ , “You can’t have him!”.

The only one that could ever be more was one that hadn’t happened yet.

~

 _Steve found that the rage burned too bright to be contained any longer, not when bolstered, fed, by hope – hope to see Bucky once more no matter how he looked, as long as he still_ existed _._

_It was time to wake._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the Captain America showgirls are a bit of an easter egg. They are all close relations of various important characters for after Steve wakes up. Some will take a long time to show up, just due to how I've planned the next part of the story.  
> Any guesses?
> 
> This is the end of Part One. Part Two is in the works.  
> However, due to the rather serious nature of this piece, there are scenes that I have ideas for of a light-hearted nature that just couldn't go in. IE, fluffy, humor shenanigans of the showgirls and the Howling Commandoes. I am taking requests for those shenanigans - feel free to give a shout out. I'll be needing light-heartedness to get past all of Steve's angst.  
> It does get better; that's the underlying theme of Part Two. Just had to set the stage for the massive angst of Steve Rogers that went ignored or downplayed in canon. I mean, really, the line "I don't trust anyone without a dark side." "Maybe you just haven't seen it yet.", was SO much foreshadow. It needed to be expanded on SO MUCH.

**Author's Note:**

> There are several stories that have inspired pieces of what I set as backstory, I give full credit to them for the idea - if those ideas are yours, please tell me so I can give credit to you. Unfortunately, I have read so many fanfiction that I can't remember where I read what where.
> 
> One is the Count Buckula idea, by darth_stitch.  
> Another is Eight-Pagers, by triedunture. In regards to how an artistic Steve would have completely drawn a shameless Bucky for money, and it totally would have been all but porn.  
> After Glow, by littlelostsputnik. I think this should be outright canon honestly. It explains SO WELL an underlying reason for all of Steve's health problems.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Waking Dreams - cover art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11283435) by [jazzy2may](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzy2may/pseuds/jazzy2may)




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